Tomorrow, German logistics company DHL is expected to launch a small drone which will fly approximately 12 kilometers (7.5 miles) from Norddeich, a village in northern Germany, to the island of Juist, a small island community off the north coast of Germany. DHL has dubbed the drone the “parcelcopter,” and it will be used to regularly deliver medications and other necessities, marking a noted advancement in the commercial use of drones worldwide.

DHL says that its parcelcopter is the first drone to fly in Europe outside of the field of vision of the pilot in a real-life mission. The company and two of its research partners worked with the German Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure to establish “a restricted flight area exclusively for this research project,” thus bypassing the kinds of regulations that have made it difficult for commercial drone use to take off elsewhere in the world (pardon the pun).

The parcelcopter's flight will also be fully automated. “This means that a pilot does not have to take any action at all during any phase of the flight,” a DHL press release explains. However, for safety reasons, and in order to comply with government requirements, “the DHL parcelcopter will be constantly monitored during the flight by a mobile ground station in Norddeich so that manual action can be immediately taken in real time if a malfunction or emergency occurs. The ground station will also maintain constant contact with air traffic controllers,” the press release says.

The flight from Norddeich to Juist should take about 30 minutes, depending on the weather. The parcelcopter itself weighs just under three pounds, according to The New York Times, and it will fly about 100 feet off the ground at a speed of around 40 miles per hour. This video (mp4) shows some of the testing of the parcelcopter.

DHL says it plans to use the parcelcopter to make its deliveries at certain times during the week and on the weekends, when it's not cost-effective to use ferries or flights. Residents of the 2,000-person island as well as vacationers will be able to place orders for prescriptions online, and when the parcelcopter lands on Juist, a DHL courier will deliver the medications to the proper recipients.

This new drone flight plan is a marked contrast to the obstacles faced by companies hoping to do commercial deliveries by drone in the United States. In June, the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) put the kibosh on Amazon's plans to make deliveries by drone, and a few weeks ago the FAA said that the University of Michigan could not use a drone to deliver the game football to the kickoff. Still, Google is apparently actively looking into commercial drone deliveries, and the US military has had many successful projects involving using drones for deliveries.

DHL, for its part, says that it has no plans to expand this pilot program at the moment, but the future is open. “To the extent that it is technically feasible and economically sensible, the use of parcelcopters to deliver urgently needed goods to thinly populated or remote areas or in emergencies is an interesting option for the future,” the company said.