A sister company of Google, Alphabet's Wing Aviation, just got federal approval to start using drones for commercial delivery. Amazon's own drone-delivery program is ready to launch as well. As drones take flight, the world is about to get a lot louder – as if neighborhoods were filled with leaf blowers, lawn mowers and chainsaws. Small recreational drones are fairly loud. Serious commercial drones are much louder.

In December, Amazon announced that it intended to deliver packages to customers using drones. But its "Amazon Prime Air" initiative, revealed on US current affairs show 60 Minutes, was widely ridiculed for being an over-hyped announcement with little to show for it. This summer, Google demonstrated its own drone-based delivery service, using a fixed-wing aircraft to deliver packages including chocolate bars, dog treats and cattle vaccines to farmers in the Australian outback. But now, German delivery firm DHL has beaten the tech firms to the post, announcing a regular drone delivery service for the first time, nine months after it launched its "parcelcopter" research project in December 2013. The service will use an autonomous quadcopter to deliver small parcels to the German island of Juist, a sandbar island 12km into the North Sea from the German coast, inhabited by 2,000 people.

Sending packages by airplane is nothing new, but the task could soon be taken over by drones. DHL recently completed of a three-month-long test of its automated drone delivery system, the Parcelcopter. It works with a combination helipad and mailbox dubbed Skyport, which can automatically load and unload the drone's payload when it lands and store it in one of the station's lockers. Testing took place between January and March of 2016 in Bavaria, Germany. The idea was to see if the drone could be used to deliver packages to areas that are remote and where standard delivery takes a long time.

Earlier this year, a small robotic helicopter flying through the Bavarian Alps made more than 100 deliveries between two villages that are within yodeling distance of each other but so far from anything else that they may as well be on Mars. The Paketkopter carried medicine and other small parcels through wind and snow without the slightest problem, even as Amazon and Google and UPS hone their autonomous tech and try not to hit anything. The little drone that could flew from one "Skyport" to another at 45 mph, turning into a half-hour slog by truck into an eight-minute hop. "We purposely chose the test area to pose a new and bigger challenge," says DHL spokesperson Dunja Kuhlmann. The German shipping company started experimenting with drones in 2013, sending small parcels across the Rhine on a quadcopter.

In flight, the wings pivot 90 degrees, and the drone flies like a plane. This first draft of history is messy. We accept now that the Wright Brothers were the first to achieve powered, human flight, and that they did so on December 17th, 1903. They were hardly the first to experiment with flight, though, and at the time the brother's work was viewed skeptically by many rivals. In the new age of drone flight, video and the internet make success easier to prove, but it's the exact definition of success that's hard to pin down.