Drone Delivery Start-Up Zipline Beats Amazon, UPS And FedEx To The Punch | CNBC

What I find interesting about this is that in the RC and drone building and flying community, you have generally two categories of aircraft: a) Aircraft that are designed to be a faithful scale model of a real thing, with all of the intricate modeling and painting work that goes into it. For example there's a person who built a model of an Antonov 225: [link] You can find flying B-29 models, jet airliner models, etc. and then b) Aircraft that are designed for a dedicated purpose and look nothing like anything that exists in the 1:1 scale aviation world, such as the "Believer" foam first-person-video plane: [link] where (b) includes other clean sheet of paper designs like Zipline's blood bank delivery drone, which has a recovery method not dissimilar to a Boeing/Insitu ScanEagle: [this video]

I've been working at Zipline for over four years now. We're building a scalable and reliable UAV based delivery system with a focus on making medical supplies accessible to all humans that need them. We're operating distribution centers in Rwanda, Ghana, and North Carolina, and I believe we're still the only such system operating in production. I'm an embedded software engineer, and I work on a lot on the firmware running in the vehicles, as well as in all the various ground equipment we've developed to make our system easier to operate. I also touch a lot of "high level" python to build out developer tools and when interfacing to the company's broader software stacks. It's important for our system to be as automated as possible so that we can hire and train local flight operators to serve their communities with minimal engineering support. I think that's something really cool about Zipline. Our flight operators are the most awesome, dedicated employees, and they're in the trenches launching hundreds of flights per day through extreme rain, heat and cold. I want to say that something like 1/3 of flights are for medical emergencies, too. I've been very happy working here, also. It's a really good group of people. Everyone's dedicated and self motivated to move quickly, without compromising family or work life balance. We try to keep communication within the company as flat and direct as possible, too. There's no corporate politics or egos to maneuver around. Our CEO's car is o