Traverse City Begins Second Phase of Medical Drone Delivery Tests

The sec­ond phase of a med­ical drone deliv­ery pilot flight project has launched in Tra­verse City. The flights will sim­u­late the trans­porta­tion of med­ical sup­plies, lab­o­ra­to­ry sam­ples and med­ica­tions between Mun­son Health­care facil­i­ties, begin­ning with test flights between Mun­son Med­ical Cen­ter and Crys­tal Lake Health Cen­ter.

The sec­ond phase builds on an ini­tial pilot con­duct­ed in May 2025, which involved near­ly 70 flights with­in a one-mile radius of Mun­son Med­ical Cen­ter. That phase focused pri­mar­i­ly on assess­ing the fea­si­bil­i­ty of using drones to trans­port patient lab­o­ra­to­ry sam­ples between health­care facil­i­ties, with the results show­ing sig­nif­i­cant poten­tial for drones as a trans­port method.

The new pro­gramme expands the scope of the tri­als, includ­ing longer flight oper­a­tions, mul­ti­ple drones and sen­sor tech­nol­o­gy. The flights have received approval from the Fed­er­al Avi­a­tion Admin­is­tra­tion.

Accord­ing to the project part­ners, the oper­a­tional data col­lect­ed dur­ing the tri­als will be used to assess how drone deliv­ery could be inte­grat­ed into health­care logis­tics, par­tic­u­lar­ly in rur­al com­mu­ni­ties. Accord­ing to the project part­ners, the oper­a­tional data col­lect­ed dur­ing the tri­als will be used to assess how drone deliv­ery could be inte­grat­ed into health­care logis­tics, par­tic­u­lar­ly in rur­al com­mu­ni­ties.

The project is sup­port­ed by a grant from the Advanced Aer­i­al Mobil­i­ty Acti­va­tion Fund, a joint ini­tia­tive involv­ing the Michi­gan Depart­ment of Trans­porta­tion, the Office of Future Mobil­i­ty and Elec­tri­fi­ca­tion, and the Michi­gan Eco­nom­ic Devel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion. Newlab is also pro­vid­ing sup­port.

The cur­rent flight pro­gramme is sched­uled to con­clude on Octo­ber 30, after which the part­ners will have addi­tion­al oper­a­tional data from the expand­ed tri­al to assess the poten­tial role of drone deliv­ery in region­al health­care logis­tics.

Thomas Sleightholm

Thomas is a con­tent writer for eVTOL Insights, cov­er­ing all aspects of the glob­al Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty ecosys­tem. Got a sto­ry for him? Please send an email to editorial@evtolinsights.com

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