Blood drones help to save lives

Drones are not best known for dropping life from the sky, but that is exactly what they are trying to do amidst the rolling hills of Rwanda.

A new fleet of aircraft which delivers bags of blood made its inaugural flight yesterday, in an effort to cut the time it takes to supply isolated clinics.

The battery-powered planes, with a two-metre wingspan and a range of 150 kilometres, can carry up to 1.5 kilograms or three bags of blood, which would save the life of a mother suffering from a postpartum haemorrhage, one of the most common causes of maternal mortality across Africa.

‘‘These flights will save lives,’’ said Gregg Svingen, from parcel company UPS.

The company developed the initiative with the Gavi vaccine alliance, which is funded by Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft.

‘‘Today it is blood, tomorrow it will be vaccines,’’ Svingen said.

The drones, which take off from a ramp with the help of a catapult, jettison their payloads by parachute from a height of about 20m over any of the 21 clinics involved in the trial. The packages land on inflatable mattresses.

They fly below 500 feet (152m) to avoid the airspace used by passenger planes.

Blood is a very precious commodity in Rwanda, ‘‘so you cannot just stock a lot of it in every single heath centre’’, said Keller Rinaudo, head of Zipline, which designed the 15 aircraft and the base that houses them outside the capital, Kigali.

The company says the cost per trip is roughly equal to that of the current delivery method, by motorcycle or ambulance.

Rwanda, known as the land of 1000 hills, is one of the smallest and most densely populated countries in Africa, but its terrain means short journeys can take a disproportionately long time.

Each aircraft could make 150 deliveries a day, the makers said.