According to Tech Crunch, Novant Health has teamed up with California-based delivery startup Zipline to help distribute medical equipment and personal protective gear in North Carolina. Novant is a non-profit healthcare provider in the Southeastern United States.
With this partnership, Zipline's unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) will fly the medical equipment from Novant's emergency drone fulfillment center in Kannapolis to the company's medical center in Huntersville, North Carolina where frontline healthcare workers treat coronavirus patients.
These 32-mile flights are the first long-range drone delivery program approved by the US Federal Aviation Administration and North Carolina's Department of Transportation. However, Tech Crunch claimed that the FAA provided it with information on how it categorizes the activities.
A drone launches from Zipline's California-based test facility
Zipline, Novant Health team up to fight COVID-19
This UAV collaboration was first developed in Africa as Zipline spent several years configuring its drone delivery model in Rwanda and Ghana. Meanwhile, it has a test facility in San Francisco, California.
In 2014, Americans Keller Rinaudo, Keenan Wyrobek, and Will Hetzler formed Zipline. The company designs its own UAVs, launch and landing systems, as well as logistics software to distribute critical medical supplies.
In 2016, Zipline entered a partnership with the government of Rwanda to test and deploy its drone service in the country. The company went live with UAV distribution of life-saving medical supplies in Rwanda late that year. Zipline claimed the program as the world's first national drone delivery program at this scale.
In the same year, the company expanded to Ghana adding the distribution of COVID-19 medication and lab samples to its services, aside from transporting blood and vaccines.
Also, because of the company's operations in Africa, Zipline was selected by regulators to participate in the testing of medical drone delivery in the US in the same year, in coordination with the FAA.
Drone delivery in the US
Zipline's African operations also led to its pandemic response partnership with Novant Health, particularly with UAV delivery before the coronavirus outbreak in the US. However, Novant Senior Vice President Hank Capps said the crisis hastened the process between both parties.
The company began its operations on May 22 from its current improvised launch site, which is a space donated by Stewart-Haas Racing, a local NASCAR competition team.
"Right now, we plan to expand it geographically within our footprint, which is fairly large within North Carolina, South Florida, and Virginia," Capps told TechCrunch.
However, any future expansion will depend on regulatory approval. Novant's Health permission to operate the current program is classified as a distribution vs. delivery operation, based on a 107 waiver that follows a federal code on the operation of unmanned aircraft in the US.
This allows Novant and Zipline to operate "until Oct. 31, 2020, or until all COVID-related restrictions on travel, business and mass gatherings for North Carolina are lifted, whichever occurs first." The FAA also highlighted that "Part 107 is a waiver, not a drone license."
Meanwhile, the FAA presumes that this partnership is the first approved long-range unmanned delivery service in the United States. "I am not aware of any that are flying routes as far as what they are doing in North Carolina," an FAA spokesperson told TechCrunch.
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