The French postal service has announced a drone delivery program to deliver parcels on a nine-mile route once a week, making France the world's first national postal service to use drones regularly.

The drone program has been cleared for launch by the General Directorate for Civil Aviation, France's airspace regulator. For now, the drones will only be flying in the southern region of Provence, as a feasibility test for the technology and regulations.

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The trial is being run by a group called DPDgroup, which has been working on the project with French drone startup Atechsys for the last two years. The current route for the drones comprises picking up packages from Saint-Maximin-La-Sainte-Beaume and taking them to Pourrières in the Var department, a region that hosts some start-up companies, including a dozen specializing in technology.

DPDgroup, an international subsidiary of French national postal service Le Groupe La Poste, said it is "a new way of addressing the issue of last-mile deliveries, especially when it comes to areas that are difficult to access." The group is particularly keen to use drones to deliver to remote areas like islands, mountain villages, and rural areas.

A delivery terminal, specially developed to assist drone at take-off and landing, secures it during the loading and unloading of the parcel. After six hundred hours of flight time, the drone managed an autonomous delivery across a distance of 8.7 miles, carrying a package that weighed 1.5kg, back in September 2015.

According to DPDgroup, its drones have a range of up to 12.4 miles and can carry a payload of 3 kg and a top speed of 18.6 mph. Their navigation system has a range of around 31 miles. They also have parachutes for safe emergency landing and will help reach mountainous regions.

In the UK, Amazon has an agreement with the Civil Aviation Authority to allow the operation of multiple drones out of line-of-sight while the American FAA is yet to agree to anything similar.