Introduction

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, or drones as they are more commonly and colloquially known, are increasingly understood as important actors, inhabiting and transforming aerial space. While emerging through a military lineage as target practice devices, ‘flying bombs’ and reconnaissance platforms, over the course of the War on Terror drones have become entrenched as key military tools for surveillance and strike operations (Gregory, 2011; Shaw, 2014; 2016). Touted as platforms enabling both the persistent surveillance of distant topographies, and the undertaking of ‘dull, dirty and dangerous’ missions, large drones such as the MQ- 9 Reaper and (now retired) MQ- 1 Predator are increasingly recognised as ‘contemporary icons’ of air power (Wall, 2013: 33). While traditionally understood as synonymous with the drone's military applications, the spatiality, morphology and iconography of the drone are shifting (Jablonowski, 2015; 2019; 2024; Klauser and Pedrozo, 2015; Jackman, 2016; 2019; 2022). Re-imagined from their battlefield applications, drones are both increasingly taking off, and anticipated to do so, in domestic urban skies. Here, a growing ecosystem of commercial, civil and consumer drones are being deployed, developed for and imagined in diverse roles, those spanning emergency service assistance, infrastructure inspection and monitoring, security provision, and the delivery of commercial and medical goods and matter (Choi Fitzpatrick et al, 2016; Jumbert and Sandvik, 2017). As the range of drone applications grows, so too do efforts around the integration of drones- at- scale into domestic airspace, through developments in approaches to Unmanned Traffic Management (UTM).

If we are, as it is asserted, entering into a ‘drone age’ or ‘zeitgeist’ (Rothstein, 2015; Coley and Lockwood, 2015), a key facet of the evolving drone imagination is the aerial delivery drone. Drones are, after all, increasingly being fielded, trialled, explored and anticipated as ‘last mile’ solutions – namely those re- imagining, and re- spatialising through the making- airborne of, the final stage of goods delivery, from the warehouse to the customer's home.