Today, Walmart and Zipline are announcing preliminary plans “to bring first-of-its kind drone delivery service to the United States.” What makes this drone-delivery service the first of its kind is that Zipline uses fixed-wing drones rather than rotorcraft, giving them a relatively large payload capacity and very long range at the cost of a significantly more complicated launch, landing, and delivery process. Zipline has made this work very well in Rwanda, and more recently in North Carolina. But expanding into commercial delivery to individual households is a much different challenge.  Along with a press release that doesn’t say much, Walmart and Zipline have released a short video of how they see the delivery operation happening, and it’s a little bit more, uh, optimistic than we’re entirely comfortable with.