Disaster Aid from Air: Edible Drones

Delivering disaster aid to areas stricken with violence or impassible roads or other reasons for inaccessibility is a problem. One company, Windhorse Aero, has a proposed solution - unpowered drones that can deliver food and other supplies and in some forms, be food and fuel for those in trouble on the ground.

For the first time ever, aid will be delivered accurately to those in desperate need with this use of a revolutionary and unique Unmanned Air Vehicle (UAV).

There were over 125 natural disasters last year, add this to areas of conflict and the number of people starving as a result gets to breath taking levels.

Access to the people affected can be restricted due to the loss of infrastructure and many other dangers. Also, traditional methods of deploying aid can be ineffective, inaccurate or just impossible to use.

Windhorse has developed a specialist UAV called POUNCER™ that will be loaded with appropriate food, transported to the disaster area and fly independently to its pre-planned destination and land accurately into the selected landing zone, avoiding all infrastructure problems, corruption or hostile groups while saving time, money and more importantly lives.

POUNCER™'s pre-formed shell can be reused to provide shelter, the frame can be burnt safely to cook food, and the payload, which is food and water, provides life saving nutrition.

Windhorse Aerospace from Windhorse Aerospace on Vimeo.

Windhorse lays out some interesting scenarios here.

I assume that some sort of small comms package goes along with these things to allow people on the ground to talk to the aid agencies about what help is needed such as medical needs and the like.

Hat tip to Aviation Week