Gadgetory

hi in the sky south of San Francisco drone company zipline is partnering with UPS to test aerial deliveries but it's not just any parcel taking off starting this summer in Africa drones like these will be delivering desperately needed medical supplies ups zipline and Garvey are going to be delivering life-saving commodities medicines blood in Rwanda this isn't your typical multicopter or unmanned aerial vehicle it is a fixed-wing drone that's capable of carrying 1.5 kilograms of medical Goods and traveling a range of 120 kilometers the fuselage is made of carbon fiber and Kevlar this makes the entire aircraft lightweight tipping the scales at just 10 kilos or 22 pounds they also fly below 400 feet and can operate in 99% of weather conditions a delivery hub can fulfill 100 drops every day with requests arriving by text message or phone call an operator packs the order and scans a QR code that gives the drone a route to the destination it flies automatically dropping the payload in a landing zone the size of three parking spaces back on solid ground we're not allowed to show you the proprietary landing system that's a secret or we can tell you is that the drone is designed to take off and land in very short distances zipline says that the cost of drone delivery is no more expensive than using motorbikes or trucks jecht is actually using the work that the Rwandan government is doing as a model to actually scale this up globally so that we can do things like global vaccination campaigns in other countries as well testing deliveries in Rwanda will generate safety information to feed back to the Federal Aviation Administration and likely lay the groundwork for drone deliveries in the United States US companies like Amazon and Walmart are already experimenting with drone delivery but federal regulations are still being debated there's always an application during a disaster relief crisis situation to do recognizance to find out where the disaster is where people are to rescue them so you're always going to have a application like that domestically and overseas as well so we'll obviously learn a lot about this this process but this is strictly a humanitarian mission and we're excited to be a part of it starting in July for Rwanda is in need of medical supplies things are looking up