Life in Flight | Chasing Genius | National Geographic

I've been building stuff since I could walk. If I could get my hands on it, I'd take it apart, and if I had an idea, I'd try to build it. When someone says something's impossible, I can figure out the way to make it possible.

This all started with a visit to Tanzania. There was this problem with medical supplies. It's not that people don't have access to the doctors; it's that the doctors don't have medical supplies on hand to treat. In most of these developing countries, you have your capitals, and then there's a handful of paved roads that go out to the next cities. But from there out, the countryside, it's all dirt roads, and most of these countries have 9-10 months of rainy season every year. It just results in trucks literally stuck in the mud and supply chains that can't get these medical products out to the doctors who need them.

Like every doctor I met was nearly in tears over this issue. That was the beginning of this mission: to solve that problem in a really magical way. And you can't do it with motorcycles or trucks, but you can do it with a simple drone. It took us months to build the prototype, and on the very first flight of that one and only prototype, we had it fly and crash. That was a big setback. There was a lot of sort of regrouping and soul searching.

Eventually, we rallied and learned from it and figured out how to do things much better to be ready. We're delivering blood in Rwanda to children who are suffering from malaria or mothers with postpartum hemorrhaging. It's so simple if you have the blood, and it's so deadly if you don't.

We get an order from a doctor by text. We put it into the zip, and then essentially you're firing it. It'll fly automatically out to the site. We'll send a text message: "Your package is about to arrive." We drop the package from the air and then fly back to provide a much more reliable and much faster source for that blood. It's really critical. Every day there are lives that could be saved, and being able to be a part of helping is really an honor.