#HTE

Serving the Poor Before the Rich: Zipline’s Wonderful Life-Saving Drones

Mobile phone usage was first implemented in developed nations, and after the kinks were worked out, trickled down to developing nations. Citizens of the latter went from shouting across a valley to speaking into a Nokia, and they were able to bypass the landline step entirely. What was once exclusively the domain of the rich came to serve the poor.

A company called Zipline is taking the opposite development route. They’re running trials of their new technology, Zip, in a developing nation first and will bring it to us one-percenters afterwards. Zip is a small, autonomous aircraft with a cargo bay, and the company has been using it to deliver blood, vaccines and medicine to folks in remote regions of Rwanda. (Which is to say, Rwanda. The country is notoriously difficult to travel through by surface.) Zip circles the target, drops its parachute-equipped payload, then whips back around to head for home.

Unlike DHL’s Osprey-like Parcelcopter, Zip is fixed-wing, and they launch the thing like a slingshot and off of a ramp.

It’s also freaking fast; it can do 60 miles per hour, cutting a winding four-hour journey down to a 15-minute straight shot. Take a look at the drone itself and what kind of impact it makes:

Interestingly enough, the project is partially funded by UPS. It’s just a matter of time before we have drone-based package deliveries in the developed world; whether it’s Amazon, DHL or UPS that gets there first, it won’t be long before our Cottonelle toilet paper and Bose headphones fall out of the sky and onto our front lawns. But it’s heartening to see that, whether out of the developers’ philanthropy or being stymied by current FAA regulations, it is the poor who will benefit from the technology first.