If you’d like to order a pizza to be brought to you by drone, you can — barely. An enterprising outfit called Williamsburg Pizza pioneered the service two years ago, and continues to offer the option in New York City. But when I tried to schedule a flying pizza recently, I learned the limits of the service. You fill out a special form on the New York City pizzeria’s website, submitting name and address, and choose between having the drone drop off the pie in the front yard or backyard, or on the rooftop.

But if you’re hungry, you might want to make other plans. Every drone delivery requires at least a week of planning and sometimes two, a strategy investment more typically reserved for a risky mission into enemy territory.

That’s not to say that drone deliveries are a gimmick. When Williamsburg Pizza announced it was going to start delivering pies by way of the NYC sky, the restaurant was not just pulling off a media stunt (though it was also that). It has continued to tinker with the service, and several bigger brands have this year joined it at the forefront of drone-delivered food. In August, Domino’s Pizza partnered with a startup called Flirtey to dispatch pizza-wielding drones in New Zealand. The following month, Google’s “Project Wing” teamed up with Virginia Tech and Chipotle to try flying burritos to college students.

Fortunately for these early entrants, a few months ago the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued the first regulations to legalize some commercial drone services. Before then, businesses only had the option of filing for special exemptions to the preexisting regulations.

Drone pizza delivery may seem frivolous (and let’s be honest, it kind of is), but it is also like any test case: a proving ground on which later innovations will be built. The tale of Williamsburg Pizza’s drone experiment shows just how far the idea has come — and just how far it still has to go.

The history of drone pizza delivery began with an ad. In 2013, a UK Domino’s Pizza franchise launched a promotion in which a “Domicopter” carried two pizzas, as a one-off stunt. In 2014, a pizzeria in Mumbai and a pizza chain in Russia both independently tested delivery drones in short-lived experiments that were halted by local law enforcement.

In New York, Charles Walters, a self-described “serial entrepreneur” and co-owner of Williamsburg Pizza, had a similar dream for his growing pie operation. When evalsuating new ventures, Walters says he likes looking for crossover opportunities to take “exceptionalism” in one industry and apply it to another.

“I wanted to be the first pizzeria in New York City to offer pizza delivery via drone,” Walters says. “In 20 or 30 years, my kids won’t believe I was the first doing this, because in the future I think we’ll be getting lots of deliveries of small goods via drones.”

To avoid running into trouble with the FAA, Walters and his fellow owners selected a flight path over contiguous private property. Their first customer was a friend of a friend named Phyllis Brody, a born-and-bred Brooklynite who was 60 years old.

The first attempt ended in a crash. But success soon followed when the drone took off from the roof of Walters’ home, flew a relatively short distance within the Brooklyn neighborhood of Prospect Heights, and dropped off its pizza pie in Brody’s hands. The local New York City papers were thrilled. In an interview with the New York Post, Walters predicted that Williamsburg Pizza would have a fleet of 25 drones delivering pizzas by 2018.

So far, Williamsburg Pizza has improved its drone of choice, progressing from a modified off-the-shelf item to a custom-built “Drone 2.0” that can fly a large pie on round trips of about four miles. Its team has grown to include both drone pilots and mechanics, including some military veterans with experience operating drones.

During trials in the tough winter months of 2014 and 2015, the Williamsburg Pizza team learned that its drones can easily be grounded by bad weather involving wind gusts, rain, and snow. The team also discovered that spring or summer deliveries can prove challenging because tree foliage can obscure a drone’s flight path and its pilot’s vision.

But the biggest obstacle, it found, was money. Paying drone pilots and mechanics, plus the operational and maintenance costs of a small drone fleet, all adds up. On paper it seemed so easy to just bee-line through the sky. But as it turns out, bikes and cars remain vastly more affordable modes of delivery. Plus, you can get your pizza that same night!

Based on what it learned — and lingering worries about getting busted — Williamsburg Pizza decided to offer an option euphemistically described as a “model aircraft aerial show” that is “strictly for promotional and demonstration purposes only.” A $59 base package enables customers to enjoy the privilege of seeing their pizza descend from the sky — as long as they are willing to wait for the week or two while Williamsburg Pizza plans out the flight path and analyzes potential landing zone hazards.

For now, Walters sees the service working best as a diversion at parties or other special occasions. “If you ever try to do delivery by drone like I have, the only way I currently see it as being viable is with a strong entertainment component,” Walters says. “The price premium just doesn’t work for any kind of delivery of any standard item.”

That doesn’t mean others won’t try. Nevada-based Flirtey is aiming to be the “Uber of drone delivery,” with plans to begin delivering Domino’s pizza pies to certain New Zealand customers by year’s end. The startup previously partnered with 7-Eleven on the first FAA-approved delivery to a US customer’s home, last July. (The two trip payloads consisted of Slurpee drinks, a chicken sandwich, donuts, hot coffee, and candy.)

Flirtey has not disclosed how it plans to become profitable. But Matt Sweeny, the relentlessly optimistic CEO of Flirtey, has been pushing his startup to compete with the likes of Amazon and Google in using drones to deliver more than just hot foods. He believes drones can become “the most effective, personal and frictionless delivery method in the market.”

Here, Google’s Project Wing offers a cautionary tale. Despite its successful burrito deliveries, it has faced a tighter budget and a reorganization under Google’s parent company, Alphabet. Project Wing leader Dave Vos left the initiative in October 2016, according to MarketWatch. This month, Bloomberg News reported that Project Wing had nixed a partnership with Starbucks as part of broader belt-tightening.

That doesn’t mean delivery drones are doomed. One problem might simply be that coffees and burritos aren’t valuable enough to justify using a drone. The San Francisco-based startup Zipline, for example, has partnered with the government of Rwanda to operate a national drone delivery service capable of delivering blood to remote transfusion clinics at distances of up to 75 kilometers. Zipline’s vision has already attracted a total of $43 million from investors, including $25 million in recent Series B funding.

A Zipline drone in action. (Courtesy of Zipline)Zipline’s fixed-wing drones fly like autonomous aircraft capable of operating in most weather conditions. The startup also aims for easy flying conditions, sending its drones only on routes where no obstacles exist and to destinations with no chance of encountering untrained people on the ground. Still, Zipline plans to obtain federal regulatory approval for US deliveries of medicine to remote Native American communities.

“It’s simple to buy a quadcopter off the shelf and then make a delivery of a candy bar over a short distance in perfect weather,” says Justin Hamilton, a company spokesperson. “It’s much more complicated to build a system that can operate at national scale, fly in heavy wind and rain, and integrate with a much larger supply chain.”

Several delivery drone entrepreneurs approvingly cited the FAA’s Rule Part 107, issued on August 29, as a “linchpin moment” in normalizing certain commercial drone uses. But the new rule has restrictions, such as requiring the drone pilot to always keep the drone within line of sight. No wonder Amazon’s “Prime Air” has looked to the UK and other countries outside the US for its initial delivery drone testing.

One workaround of the line-of-sight rule combines drones with delivery trucks. Workhorse Group, an electric vehicle company in Cincinnati, Ohio, has been testing drones that take off from a small portal on top of its trucks — vehicles already in use by UPS — and drop off packages weighing up to 10 pounds on front porches and yards of homes in rural and suburban communities. Steve Burns, CEO of Workhorse Group, likens this setup “to an aircraft carrier that gets the fighter jets close enough to their target,” which allows “both the carrier and the jet to use its individual strengths.”

Williamsburg Pizza has also migrated to this solution. It has found that the most cost-effective approach is to drive a modified “pizza spaceship” car to within a block of the final destination and launch the drone from the top of the car, according to co-owner Walters. “I’m an optimist and I would love to see things work,” he says. “We’re early.”

Ultimately, entrepreneurs can only go so far. It’s up to federal regulators to figure out how delivery drones can operate safely in the skies above homes and businesses. Countries will need an air traffic control system that can track swarms of the flying robots. But companies must also figure out when delivery drones actually make business sense, rather than just being promotional gimmicks. Until then, the old razzle dazzle of sheer spectacle may have to do.