“Terra Drone Saudia Arabia Participated in Recent Hajj Season as Technical Partner in NUPCO’s Initiative for Medical Supply”

What an inter­est­ing sto­ry. 

Japan-based Ter­ra Drone Corps’ Sau­di Ara­bi­an sub­sidiary, par­tic­i­pat­ed  as the tech­ni­cal part­ner and drone oper­a­tor in a pio­neer­ing ini­tia­tive launched by the Nation­al Uni­fied Pro­cure­ment Com­pa­ny (NUPCO), in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Sau­di Min­istry of Health, reports a press release. 

The ini­tia­tive aims to enhance the effi­cien­cy of med­ical sup­ply deliv­ery dur­ing the Hajj sea­son (recent­ly held between June 4th and 9th) using drone tech­nolo­gies.

Hajj is one of the Five Pil­lars of Islam and is a reli­gious pil­grim­age that draws more than two mil­lion pil­grims from around the world to Mec­ca, Sau­di Ara­bia each year.

This enter­prise “marks a proac­tive step in util­is­ing mod­ern tech­nolo­gies to sup­port the health­care sec­tor,” explains the release. “It address­es the logis­ti­cal chal­lenges posed by the mas­sive crowds in the holy sites, par­tic­u­lar­ly in Mina and Arafat, where tra­di­tion­al ground trans­port can take more than 1.5 hours.” Where­as, drones can reduce deliv­ery times to under 6 min­utes, great­ly improv­ing emer­gency med­ical response times.

As the tech­ni­cal oper­a­tor, Ter­ra Drone Ara­bia (TDA) deployed DJI Matrice 350 RTK craft equipped with spe­cial­ly designed trans­port box­es to ensure the safe han­dling of med­ical sup­plies by main­tain­ing the required tem­per­a­ture con­di­tions. 

These oper­a­tions were man­aged using the Unmanned Traf­fic Man­age­ment (UTM) sys­tem devel­oped by Uni­fly, a group com­pa­ny of Ter­ra Drone in Bel­gium, ensur­ing both effi­cien­cy and safe­ty. 

The release con­tin­ues, “The UTM is used to enable real-time track­ing of drone posi­tions and resolve poten­tial con­flicts between drones and oth­er air­space users, issu­ing alerts, and pro­vid­ing land­ing instruc­tions. The com­pa­ny also ensured the high­est stan­dards of air safe­ty were applied, lever­ag­ing inte­grat­ed safe­ty sys­tems com­pli­ant with oper­a­tional require­ments in dense­ly pop­u­lat­ed areas.”

Oper­a­tions were con­duct­ed under the super­vi­sion of the Min­istry of Health and co-ordi­nat­ed with sev­er­al reg­u­la­to­ry bod­ies includ­ing the Min­istry of Inte­ri­or, Min­istry of Defence, and the Gen­er­al Author­i­ty of Civ­il Avi­a­tion, help­ing to estab­lish a safe and organ­ised oper­a­tional envi­ron­ment.

Look­ing ahead, TDA is to con­tin­ue expand­ing the adop­tion of drone tech­nolo­gies not only in the med­ical field, but also across var­i­ous key sec­tors in the King­dom of Sau­di Ara­bia, con­tribut­ing to the devel­op­ment of sus­tain­able infra­struc­ture along with Sau­di Arabia’s Vision 2030.

Sau­di Ara­bia: Elec­tric Air Taxis “to Trans­port Pil­grims Dur­ing Hajj”

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, there are no exam­ples in the press release of how the drones helped peo­ple med­ical­ly. Giv­en the amount of deaths that have occurred dur­ing pre­vi­ous Hajj sea­sons, the use of such craft could be extreme­ly help­ful, for exam­ple, in assist­ing those crushed in crowds.

For more infor­ma­tion 

https://terra-drone.com.sa/

Unifly.aero

(Images: Ter­ra Drone Ara­bia)

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