jdschw

Hi viktour19. I'll try to answer your questions one at a time.

1. Generally speaking, the most technically challenging hurdle is the whole project! We are the first company in the world to build and deploy a viable commercial drone delivery system. Specifically, I would say that the vehicle navigation and autopilot, which was made in house at Zipline, has been the part that has taken the most time and effort so far. Going forward, the biggest challenge is scaling and hardening our system so it can support hundreds of deliveries per day, and thousands of deliveries per vehicle.

2. The most non-technically challenging part is definitely signing customers. Our customers are governments, and government bureaucracies are very conservative about trying out new technologies. Just ask the FAA!

3. We deliver blood in Rwanda because it's the most immediate need, and the highest value that we can bring to their health system. We are able to extend and improve their health network by taking over all blood supply for several hospitals across their country. If the need in another country is different, then we will deliver something else!

Our next location is going to be the eastern half of Rwanda, at which point we'll be able to serve the blood delivery pipeline for the entire country's health care system.

After that, who knows? It just depends on which governments or companies sign contracts with us!

Maybe someday. We're focused on the health care market because we feel that's where the need is greatest. Also, the cause in this case is so compelling that it goes a long way to help adoption of this technology. The medical delivery application is inspiring for our employees, our investors, and our government customers.

You're correct that reliability is a huge deal. It's a big differentiator between a demonstration system and one that can operate at commercial scale.

Our approach to reliability is simple: we focus on reliability in every step of our process. We do HALT (Highly Accelerated Life Testing) on all of our parts, and we have really thorough hardware and software testbeds that can simulate thousands of flights on our vehicles.

But more than anything else, we learn a ton from the fact that our system is out in the world, encountering challenges that we never could have predicted, so we can constantly improve the reliability of the system in the real world.

Our last-generation launcher had a pretty crazy 14G's, but our current generation is a much smoother 6G's. We've done tests on the blood products that we deliver, so we know that it's not affected by the transportation.

The delivery gets dropped from the air at the delivery site. One of the design requirements of our system is that no infrastructure whatsoever is needed at the delivery site. That makes it easier for us to bring up new sites, and also serve rural areas that might be very hard to reach.