The month before, the convenience-store chain 7-Eleven completed 77 on-demand drone deliveries of pizza, Slurpees, and over-the-counter medicines to customers in Reno, Nevada. Last December, three years after announcing its much-publicized Prime Air service, Amazon conducted its first commercial drone delivery, to a farmhouse in rural England. Zipline’s blood deliveries come at a time of great activity in the world of drone-enabled commerce. In emergency cases, he says, the hospital would often send the patient to the national referral hospital in Kigali rather than wait for the blood to arrive. “Before, it was a serious problem to have blood when we needed it,” says Espoir Kajibwami, a surgeon who served as Kabgayi’s medical director until February. Now, a Kabgayi lab technician simply taps out an order on a smartphone and Zipline’s distribution center, located five kilometers from the hospital, will have a drone there within 15 minutes. Emergencies meant additional trips-sometimes resulting in life-threatening delays. In the past, hospital staff would make three drives per week to procure blood products in the capital, Kigali, 60 kilometers away, a three- to four-hour round trip. The service, which is now delivering to seven of 21 planned facilities, is still in its infancy. The plastic sachets of blood are among the first commercial products ever delivered by drone, part of a partnership between the Rwandan government and the Silicon Valley–based robotics firm Zipline, which began introducing the blood drops at Kabgayi in late 2016.

Packed tightly inside are two units of human blood, which will probably soon be used for transfusions during surgeries or complicated childbirths, or to treat young victims of malaria. The contraption may resemble a children’s art project, but its contents are lifesaving. On the ground lies a red cardboard container, roughly the size of a shoebox, attached to a parachute made of wax paper and biodegradable tape. After a period of silence, it’s suddenly back, swooping over the roof of Kabgayi’s accident ward to drop its payload on the driveway with a thud. Emerging through a patch of fog, roughly 100 feet in the air, the small plane quickly disappears again, circling in an oblong pattern as it descends toward an altitude low enough to make its drop. You can hear the drone before it’s visible, whining like a mosquito above the hillside grounds of Rwanda’s Kabgayi District Hospital.

Zipline delivery