TRENDS
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The company responsible for the drone,
Zipline, is a San Francisco-based drone
delivery system startup. With close to two
billion people worldwide in danger of death or
major harm due to a lack of access to essential
medicines, Zipline’s mission is to bring urgent
medical materials to people no matter where
they live.
The process takes place in five easy steps:
Health workers request medical supplies
via text, on demand. From Zipline’s various
distribution centers—where red blood cells,
platelets, plasma, and other health products
are stored in a refrigerated room—employees
package materials and prepare them for flight.
Flying at a top speed of 80 miles per hour,
these drones deliver blood and other health
products in mere minutes, then return to the
distribution center. After a change of battery,
the drones are ready to take off again and
deliver plastic sachets of blood for surgeries,
complicated childbirths, and many other
life-threatening scenarios.
While the story of drones for humanitarian
efforts is ultimately one of saving lives, it is
also one of technology.
vaccines via text, there was no way for the
government to fulfill those requests, and they
largely went unanswered. For Rinaudo and his
co-founders, Will Hetzler and Keenan Wyrobek,
this “database of death” was alarming—and
preventable with the right technological
infrastructure.
They set about combining a mobile alert
system with drone delivery capabilities, delivering
medicine and blood to people who need
it—in time for it to save their lives. Originally
launched in Rwanda in 2016, the company has
since delivered more than 7,000 units of blood
over 4,000 flights, approximately a third of
which have been in emergency life-saving situations.
In fact, Zipline is now delivering more
than 20 percent of Rwanda’s blood supply
outside of the capital, Kigali.
And the company keeps expanding its
reach. It overhauled its plane design and
logistics system in April 2018, improvements
that decreased the amount of time between
Zipline’s receipt of an order and launch of a
fulfillment flight from 10 minutes to one, and
expanded the radius of each distribution center
to serve populations of up to 10 million people.
IN THE NICK OF TIME
For co-founder Keller Rinaudo, Zipline was an
intuitive solution to a common problem. “The
inability to deliver lifesaving medicines to the
people who need them the most causes millions
of preventable deaths each year around
the world,” Rinaudo explained in a 2016 press
release.
In Tanzania, for example, while innovations
in mobile technology in the early 2010s
allowed health workers to make thousands
of requests for emergency medicines and
AIRBORNE AMBULANCES
Drones are increasingly becoming defacto
ambulances, delivering critical supplies and
life-saving aid around the world.
Zipline’s just-in-time drone delivery, for
instance, has transformed Rwanda’s medical
supply chain, helping to increase the use
of some blood products by 175 percent and
reducing waste and spoilage by more than
95 percent.
Now forging partnerships with the UPS
Foundation and Gavi, a global vaccine alliance
PHOTOS COURTESY OF ZIPLINE