Zipline's Drones Will Deliver Blood in the United States This Year

It’s cheap, light, rigid and easily repairable.

Carbon fiber isn’t even that light if your drone isn’t a quad copter that needs pretty insane rigidity to not break apart there aren’t easily available materials that are better than some form of hard coated poly foam especially for lifting surfaces.

My exact thoughts upon reading the headline, "Is that a threat?!"

Would agree, I thought that was pretty impressive. That said, it seems a bit risky, since if you miss the target it's pretty much a guaranteed crash. I wonder why this approach was preferred to just using a net or similar, it seems like that would be substantially simpler. Landing with the cable is definitely cool looking though.

The Boeing (Insitu) scaneagle uses a similar system for recovery.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_Insitu_ScanEagle

I think that's answered near the end of the article:

While Zipline isn't making any specific announcements yet, Rinaudo did say that they're “working closely with a number of different states to demonstrate medical product delivery in suburban and rural areas." [...] Zipline is ready right now to operate at national scale, Rinaudo says, integrated with existing healthcare systems, making hundreds of long distance deliveries per day under just about any conditions.

160km (~100 miles) in particular seems limiting. There's a critical access hospital in the rural Oregon community I live in that occasionally needs more blood in a hurry, but it wouldn't have enough range to get out here. Plus with only a 101km/h (63 MPH) cruising speed, its not going to show up any sooner than ground transportation.

I can see why this is useful in Rwanda where the ground transportation infrastructure isn't as developed, but I'd be surprised if there are a lot of places in the US where its range is long enough to cover a hospital that can't keep its blood bank adequately supplied with ground transportation.