Drone News: Amazon Medical Deliveries, Aloft Wins Challenge, Drone Equipped With AI to Fight Fires

First up this week is Amazon, who has announce they will start delivering medicine in College Station, Texas. Prime air aims to transport medicine to homes within 60 minutes of ordering, and includes over 500 medications for the flue, asthma, and pneumonia. Amazon hopes to sameday delivery over 500 million packages a year, and recently we’ve seen a number of lay-offs suggesting their drone program was dying. We’ll have to wait and see if this is a turn around or a last-ditch effort to make the program a success. Next up this week is Aloft, who won the GENIUS NY challenge for innovation. The win provides Aloft with an additional $500,000, which will be used to expand their team in NY. Josh Ziering said “Securing this win at GENIUS NY is not just a testament to the innovation and hard work of the Aloft team but also underlines the promise and potential of our growing partnerships in the State of New York, With the support and visibility that comes with this investment, we’re poised to continue growing Aloft at an even faster pace.” If you’re somehow unfamiliar with Aloft, they’re the largest LAANC provider in the country and our preferred LAANC app. Aloft includes both fleet management, flight tracking, flight planning, incident tracking, and LAANC. If you’d like to learn more about Aloft, check out our Aloft Deep Dive! Third up this week is a company called DataBlanket, whose mission is to use AI to fight woodland fires. This start up was launched last year, and their goal is to use drones to determine where resources should be allocated to effectively fight the fire. DataBlanket uses a drone manufactured by Ascent Aero systems called the Spirit. The Spirit is a coaxial drone capable of flying in extreme conditions, temperatures, and weather including winds in excess of 40 mph, rain, and temps up to 130F. DataBlanket has taken the Spirit and equipped it with AI and a custom payload and swarming technology to map fires or conduct search and rescue missions. DataBlanket hopes to conduct pilot programs in late 2024 or early 2025, pending FAA approvals for BVLOS. Your final story this week is Pilot Institute! We just passed 80,000 people in our part 107 course, 80,000 subscribers on this channel, 169,000+ TRUST certificates, and over 27,500 free stickers shipped! Here’s a big thank you to those who follow us, your support makes this possible! We also just released the DJI Air 3 Deep Dive and the DJI Mini 4 Pro Deep Dive, with the Inspire 3 Deep Dive coming very soon! Last up, sorry about missing our scheduled live event this week. We got busy around the office putting out fires and when we finally stopped to think, it was already 4:15. Have a great weekend, and we’ll see you for the live next Monday! https://dronelife.com/2023/10/17/this-ai-enabled-system-teaches-drones-to-fight-fires-datablanket/ https://www.aloft.ai/blog/aloft-wins-500k-investment-at-the-genius-ny-drone-accelerator-pitch-competition/