FULFILLED POTENTIAL OF THE MONTH
Amazon has been talking up delivery drones for years, but trials with the NHS show the real potential of these flying machines, reveals
Drones can be used for far more than simply delivering a new pair of trainers or a pizza. We reveal how they’re already transporting vital medication – and could even save lives at sea.
The drone’s four rotors start spinning, pulling it up into the cool Scottish air, before buzzing into the distance. The drone will arrive at its destination, 16km away on the Isle of Mull, in 15 minutes and drop off PPE, Covid-19 tests and other sorely needed medical equipment to the local hospital. It’s a journey that would normally take over an hour – and that’s if the ferry is running.
“You’d be speaking to a nurse or a doctor on the ground, the drone would take off and disappear, and 15 minutes later while you’re still talking, you can tell them it’s landed and they’re taking the cargo out,” said Alex Brown, head of operations of the drone’s supplier, Skyports.
Drone delivery is here – and it could be surprisingly useful.
Moving on up
The idea of drones whizzing above UK traffic to drop deliveries faster than any courier has been in the works since 2016, when Amazon trialled the technology in Cambridge. The company has continued to quietly test drones in the area on private property, with a new trial in public airspace due late in 2020.
Others have joined the drone party since Amazon’s first foray into delivery drones. There have been sillier, PR-focused trials, designed to show that a company is cutting-edge or garner some headlines without actually moving the technology forward: Google’s Project Wing delivered burritos by air at a US university in 2016 and this year BrewDog flew packs of Punk IPA around the company’s campus in Ohio.
Elsewhere, real progress has been made. In Rwanda and Tanzania, Zipline uses drones to deliver medical supplies to rural locations, while in Switzerland, Matternet has run flights between two hospitals for years – though operations were briefly paused after a parachute malfunctioned and a drone crashed near a playground.
Over the past year or so in the US, aviation authorities have approved operations beyond the line of sight for UPS, Google’s Wing, Amazon Prime and Zipline. In the UK, along with Amazon’s public trials, Tesco is running its own project. However, perhaps more intriguing is the work that’s being done with the NHS, testing deliveries to and from remote and rural areas, such as Skyports’ air connection between Oban and the Isle of Mull, and a similar project linking the Hampshire coast to a hospital on the Isle of Wight.
High-flying hospital deliveries
Unlike many other drone delivery startups, Skyports doesn’t make its own drones, but buys in the best ones to do the job – akin to any logistics company, says Brown. “They’ll have a car and a van and a truck and bikes,” he said. Skyports’ fleet is currently made up of two drones. One is smaller and comes equipped with a parachute for softer landings, helpful in more built-up areas.
The second, which was used for the Oban-to-Isle of Mull flights, is a Wingcopter drone designed for rural or open areas. Not only does this feature power redundancy in case of battery failure, but also a detect and avoid system – essentially a camera that looks where it’s going. The drone flies the same route back and forth between the hospitals, but if anything gets in the way it can see the obstacle and dodge it. Or, to use Brown’s term, “perform an avoidance manoeuvre”.
The two-week long trial ran in
May and June, flying from Oban’s hospital to the community hospital in Craignure on the island, carrying tests, samples and other equipment between the pathology lab in the former and the hospital in the latter. “One day the lab [on the Isle of Mull] ran out of collection tubes, so they couldn’t collect blood,” he said. “So we flew some over.”
Now, Skyports is filing its paperwork with the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) for approval to run the same trial for three months over the winter. If that’s successful – and the Scottish winter weather will unquestionably prove a challenge – Skyports hopes to offer recurring operations of drone logistics in the middle of 2021.
One challenge with drone deliveries is convincing the locals. “Everyone talks about public acceptance and community engagement and making sure that we have a social license to fly,” said Brown. The best way to do that, he believes, is to show the benefits by running the trial – and as a company delivering PPE and tests amid a pandemic, usefulness wasn’t in question among the local medical staff. “You’re taking something that’s normally a real faff to do and making it easy.”
Cutting out a ferry journey was also at the heart of the trial in May, connecting the Isle of Wight to the mainland at Lee-on-the-Solent airfield with a flight time of 13 minutes. The fixed-wing Windracers Ultra drone can carry up to 100kg, although in the trial it hauled less than half that weight in medical supplies for St Mary’s Hospital on the island.
“The drone will lower to 15m before winching down the food on a biodegradable linen thread to the specified delivery location”
Deliveries by air
The idea of a social licence will be put to a tougher test with upcoming trials run by Tesco and Amazon. Rather than deliver medical supplies for the NHS in hard-to-reach places, they’re eyeing the wider goal of airborne packages. Amazon’s latest trial is set to start in late 2020, while Tesco is planning a six-month trial in Ireland with local startup Manna.
Manna has already been making drone deliveries in Ireland, chalking up 25,000 drop-offs of food and pharmacy orders organised via an app. “The customer can then drop a pin where they would like the delivery to be made to [their] lawn or driveway,” said Manna’s founder and CEO Bobby Healy. “Customers are notified when the drone is above their designated delivery point, at which point you will accept the delivery on the app and the drone will lower to 15m before winching down the food on a biodegradable linen thread to the specified delivery location.”
The trial with Tesco will take place in the town of Oranmore, near Galway. “Our main goal is to assess consumer adoption of the service,” Healy explained, and will deliver everything from pharmaceuticals to books to hardware. The flights will run from
Tesco and participating local stores and take about three minutes.
Manna’s drones were supposed to be delivering takeaways in Dublin with JustEat, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, and Irish-Thai restaurant chain Camile beginning in March 2020, but the pandemic disrupted those plans. Instead, Manna joined forces with Ireland’s Health Service Executive to deliver medicine and other key supplies on Moneygall, a town famous for being the ancestral home of Barack Obama. The drones flew from the motorway-adjacent plaza named for the former president – home to a petrol station, as well as a bronze statue of Barack and Michelle – into Moneygall proper, a distance of just 1km.
“Along with vital supplies, Manna also delivered some more oneoff items like a birthday cake to a young boy as he could not have his birthday, and a bicycle puncture repair kit,” Healy said.
“We also successfully delivered six fresh eggs, uncracked, to a local homebaking enthusiast.”
What’s next?
All of those trials have one thing in common: they’re testing drones flying beyond the visual line of sight. In other words, they’re sent off on their own and not controlled by a human pilot. “That’s the key thing,” said CAA assistant director Jonathan Nicholson. “We’re not that bothered about what people are doing with their drones… we’re interested more in whether it can be done safely.”
And that’s not easy in uncontrolled airspace, he adds, as a drone could come across anything from military jets doing exercises to hang gliders, air ambulances and small planes out for a pleasure flight, some of which won’t have radios or other electronic positioning equipment onboard. In I controlled airspace, the various airborne vehicles are directed by air-traffic controllers. In uncontrolled airspace, there’s no management, meaning either a system to keep everyone aware of each other must be developed or drones need to learn how to dodge. As redundancy is a respected idea in aviation, Nicholson says both emergency manoeuvring and unmanned traffic management systems will be required.
While those challenges are being sorted out – and Nicholson predicts commercial drone
delivery services are at least five years away – trials will continue to be sited in rural areas. There’s less risk of injury or damage if a drone did fall from the sky, making regulatory approval easier to win. For Skyports’ trial from Oban, it has been given restricted airspace – a “Temporary Danger Area” – which means others can use it, but they have to alert the team first to avoid any conflict.
But perhaps there’s another reason why the trials are being performed in uncrowded areas: there’s less risk of annoying locals. Imagine finding out that a drone hub was being set up in your neighbourhood, with your home under the buzzing flight path of automated machines flying non
“We have that social licence because we’re carrying someone’s blood test… carrying a pair of sneakers, that’s much less interesting”
essential deliveries to people who couldn’t be bothered to wait for a ground-bound human courier to arrive.
The CAA focuses on safety, but Nicholson says the regulator stresses to companies that they need to consider the social licence, ensuring they consult local people and involve government and communities. “That’s not something we do directly as a safety regulator, but they need to obviously factor that in and think about it,” he said.
For those reasons, drone deliveries of medical supplies in rural areas seem easier on a technical level, as well as a social one. “When you hear an ambulance go past you on the street, that’s annoying – but it’s fine, because that’s saving someone’s life,” explained Brown. “It’s the same with us: we know we have that social licence because we’re carrying someone’s blood test… carrying a pair of sneakers across London, that’s much less interesting.”
Plus, he notes, we already have ways of swiftly moving cargo around cities, such as bikes and scooters. Instead, drones should be used where they’re needed, in remote, rural areas for essential deliveries. “People talk about drones taking over the logistics of the world,” Brown said. “They’re not.”