Drones Meeting the Corona Virus Challenge

Dean Sigler Electric Powerplants, GFC, Sustainable Aviation Leave a Comment

“Ramadan Mubarak, Dean! “As a kid who grew up in the ’80s, I thought by 2020 we’d have flying cars and a clean planet, and yet here we are grappling with a global pandemic and much uncertainty in these very strange times.” This greeting from Hani Almadhoun, Director of Philanthropy for  the the United Nations Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. UNRWA USA, reminds us of our common humanity and spirituality while lamenting the fact that we don’t yet have those long-promised flying cars or at least a well-looked-after planet. Like the virus, the unfulfilled dream of a “flying car” seems universal. Faced with an imperfect reality, fixed- and rotary-wing drones are showing their worth in fighting the Corona virus (COVID-19) virus and other diseases worldwide. We will sample from A (Alphabet) to Z (Zipline) performing life-saving tasks in sometimes surprising ways. Alphabet The Verge reports, “Alphabet’s nascent drone delivery service is booming. “Alphabet’s drone delivery company Wing …

First Commercial Drone Medical Delivery

Dean Sigler Announcements, Electric Powerplants, Sustainable Aviation Leave a Comment

Medicine, STAT! Matternet is a U. S.-based company promoting its mission to, “Make access to goods as frictionless and universal as access to information.  Our products enable organizations around the world to build and operate drone logistics networks for transporting goods on demand, through the air, at a fraction of the time, cost and energy of any other transportation method used today. “ On March 27, it announced a collaboration with United Parcel Service (UPS) that delivered the first commercial medical payload at the WakeMed medical facility in North Carolina. Other non-commercial operations by Zipline, operating in Rwanda and Gambia; and  Swoop Aero, Ltd. and Wingcopter delivering vaccines in the South Pacific, are bringing “last mile” delivery of medical goods and services to remote locations. The Hustle, an on-line news source (we go to no ends to find the latest intelligence), reports, “By working closely with regulators, UPS became the first fully operational, revenue-generating drone delivery service, beating competitors including …

DHL Parcelcopter Delivers the (Medical) Goods

Dean Sigler Hybrid Aircraft, Sustainable Aviation Leave a Comment

Vertical Daily News this morning reports on the DHL Parcelcopter 4.0 as it delivers medicines to an island in Lake Victoria on the northern tip of Tanzania.  The Parcelcopter is a fourth generation design from Wingcopter, a German drone manufacturer.  It’s found delivering packages autonomously in German mountain demonstrations and now in differently rugged terrain, flying life-saving packages to a remote island. With financial help from the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ – The German Society for International Cooperation ) GmbH ( on behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), DHL and Wingcopter have flown a total of 1,367 miles (2,200 kilometers) and about 2,000 flight minutes in a six-month trial.  The 37-mile (60-kilometer) flights averaged about 40 minutes. Compare such speedy deliveries to the time, personnel, and energy required on the six-hour overland route of 150 miles (240 kilometers).  ).  As Vertical Daily News notes, “That makes it nearly impossible to provide emergency medication …

Autonomous Drones Air-Drop Medical Supplies

Dean Sigler Batteries, Electric Powerplants, Sustainable Aviation Leave a Comment

Zipline, a San Francisco-based startup, has partnered with the government of Rwanda to air-drop medical supplies to remote villages, truly a potential life-saver for many without immediate access to medicine or blood for transfusions. Several firms in America have promised delivery of consumer items using drones, with Flirtey’s quadrotor drone delivering “a package that included bottled water, emergency food and a first aid kit” to an uninhabited residential setting in Hawthorne, Nevada on April 7. Flirtey calls the flight “the first fully autonomous, FAA-approved urban drone delivery in the United States.” Another firm, Matternet, displayed its quadrotor delivery systems five years ago at the Green Flight Challenge Expo held at NASA Ames Research Center following the completion of the flying completion. They have delivered in New Guinea, the Philippines, Bhutan and Haiti for Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), and according to the New York Times, “experimenting with the government of Malawi and with UNICEF to deliver infant H.I.V. tests …

Flying Donkeys – A New Cargo Paradigm

Dean Sigler Electric Powerplants, Sustainable Aviation Leave a Comment

Richard Glassock, of eight-seat, self-launching, sight-seeing sailplane fame, alerted your editor to a different kind of challenge in Africa that could expand the use of drones for positive outcomes. An earlier and ongoing effort to provide “last mile” delivery of small, high-value items such as medicines and electronics to remote villages came from Matternet, a Palo Alto, California based group whose slogan, “Lifting the Rising Billion,” refers to its aspirations to deliver necessities in Africa, but was first demonstrated in Haiti in August and September of 2012. Here they fulfill a mission to Port-Au-Prince, Haiti, at a camp that was set up after the 2010 earthquake. The crowding, seen from overhead, would make expeditious travel through this camp almost impossible in any way other than air. A new group, Flying Donkeys, hopes to raise the weight-carrying capabilities of Matternet’s small packages to 20 kilograms (44 pounds) and has established an “escalating series of sub-challenges” that will lead to a race …

Matters of Note for the Green Flight Expo

Dean Sigler Electric Powerplants, Sustainable Aviation Leave a Comment

One humanitarian business organization that will display at the Green Flight Expo following the completion of that seven-day event uses the type of technology the CAFE Foundation espouses for carrying medicines and supplies to remote parts of the third world that otherwise do not easily permit transport of any kind. Matternet’s slogan, “Lifting the Rising Billion” refers to those living primarily in Africa and is explained in their statement of belief.  “By increasing the access to reliable transportation for people living in poverty, we will enable them to find a sustainable path out of poverty. “We will connect people from geographically isolated communities to local and global markets through the Matternet.”  This credo applies to poor communities throughout the world, and Matternet is committed to creating airborne supply networks worldwide. Mechanisms are simple enough, with quadrotor helicopters, much like those used by Stanford Professor Sebastian Thrun and his alumni, Nicholas Roy (now assistant professor at MIT) in their investigations of …