As FreightWaves predicted last month, the future of last-mile delivery will be many things — fast, flexible, automated, sustainable. One thing we didn’t mention is that it will also be airborne.

Drone delivery is taking off. Long seen as some kind of Jetsonian future, drones today are delivering everything from chicken wings and beer to lifesaving medical supplies, and they’re doing it in cities, backyards and everywhere in between.

While reports of hiccups within Amazon’s drone delivery program might suggest clouds in the forecast for drone delivery, there are a host of other companies that see only clear skies, particularly in the final mile.

Ahead of FreightWaves’ The Future of Supply Chain event May 9-10 at the Rogers Convention Center in Northwest Arkansas, we asked them what to expect from last-mile drone delivery in the coming years.

Question: What part of the supply chain do you call home?

Yariv Bash, CEO, Flytrex: ??We’re focused on home door delivery. And even more specifically, in the suburbs, which are actually most of the U.S. market, roughly two-thirds of the U.S. population lives in private houses. There are more than 82 million single-family detached homes. And that’s our focus. But we’re actually not a drone delivery company. We’re more like an on-demand company using drones because we’ve got the entire stack for the drones themselves — which we design, manufacture and certify with the FAA — all the way to the app that’s installed on the end customer’s iPhone or Android.

Dan O’Toole, CEO, DroneDek: DroneDek owns the last few feet of the last mile of package delivery and will enable traditional, drone and autonomous delivery. Even if drone delivery were enabled across the country right now, there’s not a safe, platform-agnostic place to deliver packages, and we all know the piracy rate for packages left on doorsteps. Our mailbox works now for any kind of delivery, giving users a secure, climate-controlled, app-controlled space that will be great when drones are enabled for delivery.

Alexa Dennett, head of communications, Wing: We’re focused on last-mile delivery of lightweight, everyday essentials like medicine, food and household goods that by some estimates account for over 80% of all last-mile deliveries. Moving these goods around by drone can cut down on traffic, reduce emissions and make our roads safer. It can also help retailers boost sales and bring added convenience for consumers. At the end of the day, it makes a lot more sense to deliver a bottle of Advil via a 10-pound drone than it does with a 3,000-pound vehicle.

Andrew Patton, head of U.S., Manna: Last mile — specifically, on-demand last mile. DoorDash is an excellent analog for the type of delivery we can do — but we can do it farther, faster and at lower cost.

Question: What are some headwinds and tailwinds facing the last mile of drone delivery going forward?

Bash: It’s not an easy industry. When we started, we realized that this is more a marathon than a sprint. We’ve been working hand in hand with the FAA for more than four years now as part of the Integration Pilot Program and then the BEYOND program. And basically, it’s one step at a time. It’s not a zero to one. But we are already servicing close to 10,000 families. We have three stations operating in North Carolina. We are operating now in Texas. I hope that by the end of this year, the beginning of next year, we’ll start seeing even more stations, more deliveries — not just by Flytrex, but by the other companies as well, because the market is so big. There’s room for everybody.

O’Toole: Right now, it’s the regulatory process. Technology, as is so often the case, is ahead of the government’s regulatory structure, but we’re getting there with recent action from the Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) Aviation Rulemaking Committee (ARC), which issued recommendations in March calling for regulation relaxation that’s key to enabling drone delivery. We’re ready, and the drone industry is ready too. Consumers are more than ready.