JESSICA KIM COHEN October 02, 2019 12:34 PM
UPS has set its sights on serving hospital
campuses after earning a first-of-its-kind federal certification to expand its
drone delivery network.
UPS Flight Forward, a UPS subsidiary, last week
earned Part 135 Standard certification from the Federal Aviation
Administration. That marks the first time the FAA has awarded a company full
approval to operate a so-called "drone airline," lifting restrictions
on how many drones the company can deploy and the weight of cargo onboard the
drones, UPS said in a statement Tuesday.
UPS said its initial customer base for the drone
delivery service will be hospital campuses.
Earlier this year, UPS launched its healthcare delivery service through a
partnership with drone manufacturer Matternet, WakeMed Health & Hospitals,
the North Carolina Department of Transportation and the FAA. The service will
test whether using drones to transport lab samples across WakeMed's Raleigh,
N.C., facilities will reduce turnaround time for lab results.
UPS said it has already started flying under the
new certification at WakeMed's campus.
It's not the first time drones have been used in
a hospital setting, though other projects have been more limited in scope.
This past spring, researchers with the
University of Maryland successfully delivered a donor kidney to surgeons at the University
of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore via drone. Drone startup Flirtey in
2016 partnered with Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine to test
ship-to-shore deliveries of blood samples, but has since pivoted its healthcare
efforts to work with EMS providers by delivering automated external defibrillators, or AEDs.
With this new certification under its belt, UPS
said its initial focus will be expanding the drone delivery service to more
hospital campuses. UPS did not discuss next steps for its healthcare ambitions,
but said it would build on its pilot project with WakeMed to "expand to a
variety of critical-care or lifesaving applications."
Other long-term goals for the company include
stepping beyond the healthcare industry to transport other regulated goods.
"We will soon announce other steps to build
out our infrastructure, expand services for healthcare customers and put drones
to new uses in the future," UPS CEO David Abney said in a statement.
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