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24 Dossier | Wings For Aid MiniFreighter 8/500FW standard UN shelter kit, for example, has that packed volume. “From the start of the project we knew we had to build a drone that would deliver large numbers of 20 kg boxes by airdrop,” Koperberg says. Most airdropped supplies float down under small parachutes but Koperberg’s engineers, led by Alexis Roseillier, were concerned about potential problems such as wind causing the boxes to drift off course. Current systems tend to drift with the wind, requiring a large drop zone, and tend to be expensive for one- way logistics. Wings For Aid wanted to offer more precision and lower cost. Here, Koperberg gives a respectful nod to Zipline (featured in UST 21, August/September 2018), which delivers small packages of up to 1.75 kg over short ranges, while another provider, AirDropBox, offers three sizes of box for payloads of 5, 20 and 80 kg. Both Zipline and AirDropBox use parachutes. These considerations led Wings For Aid to the idea of a low-cost box that could be dropped without a parachute, and would always land on its base and protect its contents. While typical contents would probably include fairly robust items such as food, blankets and tents, there would also be more fragile things such as bottles of water and vaccines, so the team decided that the box should incorporate a crumple zone in the bottom. It was the subject of an engineering programme in its own right. Proven base aircraft The other half of the programme is, of course, the UAV system itself. This had to be capable of carrying a useful number of aid boxes over the desired mission radius, and had to have sufficient margins of stability to cope easily with changes in weight and centre of gravity, as well as the aerodynamic effects of dropping the boxes, while making the ground operations such as reloading safe, fast and simple. The number of boxes settled on for the first aircraft was eight, for a payload of 160 kg, and dropping the boxes from under the aircraft. Keen to take advantage of proven aeronautical technology, and acutely aware of the compressed timeline, Wings For Aid asked for proposals from the December/January 2021 | Unmanned Systems Technology Airflow deploys the delivery boxes’ air brakes, slowing them and keeping the centre of pressure above the centre of gravity to ensure that they land bottom first (Courtesy of Wings For Aid) The MiniFreighter’s fuselage/cargo pod is a tubular steel structure covered by a composite sandwich skin. Founder Barry Koperberg is pictured here standing next to lead engineer Alexis Roseillier (Courtesy of Wings For Aid) Typical contents would include robust items but also more fragile things, so the team decided to incorporate a crumple zone