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San Francisco drone startup plans drug deliveries to houses in Salt Lake Metropolis

By Ira Boudway | Bloomberg

California-based drone startup Zipline plans to begin delivering medicines and other supplies to households in Salt Lake City, Utah. The company, whose fixed-wing drones have been transporting medical supplies to rural clinics in Rwanda and Ghana since 2016, has signed a service contract with Intermountain Healthcare of Utah to deliver to its patients in the city. Zipline expects the first deliveries to occur in the spring of 2022 and hit hundreds per day within four years of the service’s launch.

A zipline drone that delivers vaccines. (Zipline Inc.)

“We are excited to help lead the industry beyond the pilot phase and build something that can lead to a large commercial operation,” said Conor French, Zipline’s general counsel, in an interview Tuesday. The company will be able to reach around 90 percent of households in the greater Salt Lake City area with its drones, which navigate autonomously via satellite and parachute payloads of up to four pounds, French said.

Zipline plans to use yards and driveways for drops. Before it can begin, it must be approved by the Federal Aviation Administration. The company has applied for certification under the FAA program, known as Part 135, for unmanned parcel delivery.

“We are very confident that we will receive Part 135 certification in good time,” said French. (FAA spokeswoman Emma Duncan said via email that the administration would not comment on ongoing certification projects.)

Intermountain, a nonprofit founded in 1975 on a gift from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, operates 24 hospitals and 215 clinics in Utah, Idaho, and Nevada, and serves approximately half of the population of Salt Lake City over 1, 25 million. Initially, the zipline service will focus on homebound and immunocompromised patients. In later stages, Intermountain plans to use drones to fill out routine prescriptions and dispense over-the-counter medications, with patients using online registration to arrange delivery within 15-30 minutes. “We see this as a long-term relationship,” said John Wright, Intermountain’s vice president of supply chain and support services.

Since its inception in 2014, Zipline has said it has flown 15 million kilometers and made more than 215,000 deliveries, including hundreds of thousands of Covid vaccine doses, in Africa. Its drones take off from catapults and can fly back and forth for up to 100 miles – and service up to 8,000 square miles from a single hub. Earlier this year, the San Francisco-based company raised $ 250 million on a valuation of $ 2.75 billion.

Last year Zipline ran a pilot program that delivered personal protective equipment to two health facilities in North Carolina with limited FAA approval. Drone operators supported by Alphabet Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and United Parcel Service Inc. have already been certified as unmanned airlines by the FAA.

(Corrects the number of Covid vaccine doses as per paragraph 6; updates the items Zipline plans to deliver.)

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