In June this year, in Zizhong, Sichuan Province, JD Logistics launched its first batch of 78 UAV delivery routes, covering 78 administrative villages and 55,000 villagers. It is reported that the UAVs take off from town-level stations and can fly across mountainous areas in as fast as 7 minutes. This network has now expanded to 131 routes, with plans to cover all 301 administrative villages in the county by the end of the year! This is currently the largest UAV delivery-to-village network in China.
Behind the numbers lies an efficiency revolution and economic viability. In Qu County, Dazhou, 48 routes cover 45 villages, improving delivery efficiency by over 80% and reducing comprehensive costs by approximately 50%. Mountainous logistics have long been subjected to a "terrain tax," with compounding markups for road construction, detours, and labor. Low-altitude routes directly eliminate this geographical disadvantage: the distance remains unchanged, while time and costs are repriced.
What truly deserves attention are the "mechanism" and the "business model".
Sichuan has not simply thrown money into subsidies; instead, it has established a dedicated government-enterprise coordination mechanism: the government ensures sites and last-mile personnel, while enterprises handle equipment and operations. Provincial and municipal governments invest jointly, providing financial support for eligible UAV logistics scenarios. This division of labor spares enterprises from bearing the heavy asset pressure of infrastructure alone, enabling the rapid rollout of take-off and landing points in pilot towns and pickup points at the village level. The hardest part of the low-altitude economy has never been taking off, but rather "landing safely, receiving efficiently, and sustaining operations".
One-way "express delivery to villages" only solves half the problem.
The true closed-loop business model lies in two-way flow: After being picked, sweet cherries in Hanyuan, Ya'an, are delivered by heavy-lift UAVs to the cold chain sorting point at the foot of the mountain in 10 minutes, saving about 2 hours compared to trucks and reducing the loss rate from 15% to below 3%. This is then linked with the sorting center at the foot of the mountain, mobile sorting vehicles, and full cargo aircraft, allowing cherries picked in the early morning to reach major cities nationwide as early as the next day. For farmers, a decrease in the loss rate directly translates to increased income, which is more convincing than any concept.
As scenarios are validated, products iterate accordingly. JD Logistics has launched the "Flying Wolf" L05, featuring a payload capacity of 5 kg and a range of 40 km. It can be paired with robotic arms for automatic battery swapping and automated loading and unloading of cargo boxes, achieving fully unmanned operations from take-off to landing—extracting labor from the most costly segments makes regular operations economically viable.
From village delivery to the outbound delivery of agricultural products, and then to the deployment of fully unmanned models, low-altitude logistics is crossing a critical dividing line: shifting from policy-driven pilot demonstrations to daily services with calculable costs.
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