Zipline: Drones Delivering PPE in North Carolina

When we covered Zipline in 2017, the company had launched in Rwanda the year prior, primarily using their unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to transport blood, plasma, and coagulants to 21 medical facilities in the country. Treacherous terrain and underdeveloped infrastructure on the western side of Rwanda was making it difficult for traditional transportation to get to medical facilities fast enough, and Zipline drones decreased this critical time by bypassing ground delivery obstacles. Now with the COVID-19 pandemic, the company announced last month that it would be using its drones to deliver medical supplies and PPE to a medical center in Charlotte, North Carolina. The aerial deliveries are completely contactless, and the medications are parachuted down upon target location arrival. 

Zipline drone launching from a distribution facility.

Approval for drone logistics has been challenging to get in the United States - and Zipline is the longest-range drone delivery service approved by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Approvals are range and route-specific, so for Zipline to scale to other facilities or even to home deliveries in the future, they will have to work with the FAA for additional clearance. The drones cruise at over 60 mph and can carry just shy of four pounds of cargo, which equates to several pints of blood that a medical facility can get, rain or shine. And at their current capacity, Zipline is moving nearly one ton of inventory per day across each of their regions.  

While COVID-19 certainly helps the company gain traction in a contactless world, the value of the business is giving medical facilities better supply-chain management. Medical facilities that run out of critical supply, or need expensive-to-store cold-chain products (platelets, antivenin, oxytocin, blood products) can count on Zipline deliveries to get access to emergency product stocks on-demand. By streamlining provider logistics, Zipline can help medical facilities cut costs from overstocking and expiries while increasing patient health. We'll be watching this company closely as they expand in North Carolina with Novant Health, as well as the broader drone delivery market as Matternet and Wing also start to test their drones.