Rwanda was the first country to deliver blood by drone nationally

3 min read

On 14 October 2016 Rwanda became the first country to use drones to deliver medical supplies on a national scale. The service, run by the American company Zipline in partnership with the Rwandan government, began by flying blood to hospitals from a base in Muhanga District, west of the capital Kigali. Rather than landing, the drones dropped their cargo from the air on small paper parachutes.

How the service began

Zipline signed an agreement with the Rwandan government in 2016 to build a distribution centre near Muhanga. President Paul Kagame attended the launch ceremony there, and the vaccine alliance Gavi, which supported the project alongside other partners, described it as the world’s first national drone delivery service. At the start the base had a fleet of 15 drones and was set up to make up to 150 on-demand emergency deliveries a day.

The first phase covered 21 transfusing facilities in the western half of Rwanda. The partners planned to extend coverage to the eastern half of the country, which would bring almost all of Rwanda’s roughly 11 million people within reach. Blood was chosen first, with other medicines and vaccines expected to follow.

The drones and the parachute drop

The aircraft are not quadcopters but small fixed-wing planes with a wingspan of about 2 metres. Reports at the launch put their weight at around 13 kg. They are battery powered and are thrown into the air by a catapult, reaching about 84 km/h as they leave the launcher. Each drone could carry about 1.5 kg of blood, roughly three units, and had a range of about 150 km for a round trip.

When a drone reaches its destination it drops low and releases the package. The blood travels in a red cardboard box about the size of a shoebox, attached to a wax paper parachute with biodegradable tape. MIT Technology Review reported that the drones released their loads from about 100 feet, aiming for a target area five metres across near the health centre. The drone then flies back to base, where it lands on inflatable mats.

From hours to minutes

Before the drones arrived, staff at Kabgayi District Hospital, the first site to receive deliveries, drove to Kigali about three times a week to collect blood. The city is around 60 km away and the round trip took three to four hours. With the new system, a laboratory technician could order blood by smartphone and a drone would arrive within about 15 minutes. Across the network, Gavi said orders would be met in around 30 minutes.

Speed matters because blood is difficult to store. It has a shelf life of 42 days and must be kept refrigerated, so small rural hospitals often struggled to hold enough of every type. Zipline kept stocks at its base and could also send products such as platelets, fresh frozen plasma and cryoprecipitate, which many local facilities had found hard to keep on hand.

Early limits

The service grew gradually rather than all at once. By mid-2017 seven of the 21 planned facilities were receiving deliveries, and Kabgayi had gone from about 11 deliveries a week in early 2017 to about 20 a week by late May. At that stage the Rwanda Civil Aviation Authority had not yet approved night flights, so the hospital still relied on road trips to Kigali for emergencies after dark. Even so, the 2016 launch marked the first time any country had built drone delivery of blood into its national health system.