F.H. Hinsley, patron saint of use cases, bless our drones for Africa
‘Everyone knows’ that, through logical brilliance and by setting the foundations of modern computing, the mathematician Alan Turing and the Bletchley Park Hut 8 team cracked the German Enigma Code, giving the Allies the upper hand, and shortening the Second World War, because they could avoid German U-Boats: https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/how-alan-turing-cracked-the-enigma-code.
Slightly fewer people know of the role of Sir Harry Hinsley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Hinsley https://spartacus-educational.com/Francis_Harry_Hinsley.htm, who was recruited to Bletchley Park as a history undergraduate at St John’s, Cambridge. He made big contributions in ‘traffic analysis’ – what could be deduced from the structure of the unbroken Enigma traffic, a classic of ‘making bricks without straw’, from which modern metadata things build.
And it was Hinsley who made the decisive operational observation, that the place to look for code books for months ahead would be in the safe of a German weather ship on long term station. That led to the boarding of, and retrieval of code books from the München, and later the Lauenburg, and the flow of ULTRA information. You might without injustice call Hinsley the patron saint of use case thinking: he repeatedly saw what was material, and what to apply, where, to deliver a transformative result.
After the war, Hinsley went back to St John’s, Cambridge, wrote the history of Allied intelligence efforts, and ended up successively Master and Vice-Chancellor – a fairly awesome bit of social mobility from growing up the son of a carter and a school caretaker in Walsall, either by the standards of then or now.
Hinsley comes to Africa
But the point about use cases I think is not an irrelevant one: contexts here are different to those in the Global North. We have 21st Century fintech – distinctly ahead of what you have in the Global North, where you survive without mobile money in Europe, and on a Byzantine combination of Venmo and hard copy cheques in the US. We have 20th Century physical transport infrastructure between cities and towns, which at various distances upcountry, gives way to unmetalled tracks that could be of any time or age at all: in Europe you have TGV lines, in America, self-driving cars.
A consequence of this is a kind of Steampunk character to existence: mobile money and global near-instant remittances end up with the lady thumbing many notes in a dusty kiosk or dukkan shop. Logistics, particularly in more austere contexts, are held together with string, yet beer and branded soda pop get through the swamps of South Sudan and the Congo forest, and connectivity is cheaper per GB in fragile Somalia than anywhere else.
Bring me my Bugatti Spaceship
Which brings me onto drones/UAVs in general, and cargo drones in particular.
Remotely-piloted aircraft have been a thing for the best part of a century, and used for military reconnaissance since the Vietnam war. Dates you could note in the production of drones for civil uses could include DJI setting up in 2006, and Zipline in 2014. For a decade, they’ve been used in Africa for things ranging from wildlife surveillance, to flood mapping in Malawi to high-cost-low-weight deliveries of bags of blood: https://www.youtube.com/@AfricanDroneForum has a nice collection of videos, Aiga Stokenberga and Maria Catalina Ochoa at the World Bank have written a thoughtful book about the cost and productivity function, and the UK’s Frontier Technologies Hub produced a helpful synthesis of their experience: https://www.frontiertechhub.org/resources/uav-portfolio-review.
And yet at the moment, drones in Africa haven’t exactly hit the potential of Wakanda “the most scientifically and technologically advanced country on the planet” (HT: https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/real-world-wakanda-aviation-black-panther).
Some tech has been more robust than others. Payload, range and remote capability have sometimes been a bit sub-scale, costs a bit high. Some of those who had talked big Africa operations have flexed back to grocery delivery ++ in the Global North. And the recent administration of Swoop Aero, with eight digit debts outstanding, has shown that the market hasn’t failed to notice.
But I think the sector is now getting towards a place that offers a relatively sustainable combination of cost and value.
Windracers ULTRA: the flying ProBox
Most people in Africa know the Toyota ProBox, whose name describes it well: durable, little changed since 2002, super cubic capacity (hence the name), and van-style springs at the back so you can load it up; in short, generally both simple and thoughtful.
Almost two years ago, I started helping Windracers, a British firm that seemed to me to have a useful, ProBox-y kind of product, the Windracers ULTRA™ (which is short for Uncrewed Low-Cost TRAnsport, no direct relation to the ULTRA mentioned above):
· Up to 150 kg usefulload, with 700l cubic capacity in the cargo hold
· Can take off and land on a 150m football pitch that is not of the flattest – dirt, marram, ice, tarmac, grass, etc.
· Land where you can, drop, rather accurately, with or without a small parachute, where you can’t
· Up to 1,000km range
· Runs on regular petrol, not special aero fuel
· Tare (that is unladen) weight reasonably low relative to payload
· Design that is robust, durable and reliable
· Airframe can fly day and night upcountry: supervising operator can be remote, with cup of tea and/or cat – the aircraft fly the route that’s been input, the operator is in the loop and can intervene
· Designed with redundancy/“no-single point of failure” approach – it will continue to fly even if one of the engines or components is damaged or fails
In the UK, it’s been used for the 0.01% of routes and tasks that need these capabilities – mail for the furthest Orkney Islands, medical supplies to the Scillies, supporting troop resupply in Ukraine, etc. But in Africa, there are far more such routes and use cases. For example:
· Hundreds of clinics in Eastern DR Congo, that currently get rare deliveries by 4*4 or motorbike: one Windracers ULTRA can deliver monthly resupply kits to multiple clinics in one flight.
· Emergency therapeutic food in the swamps of South Sudan: WFP could get 650 sachets of Plump’yNut on one Windracers ULTRA, or run up and down all day to do general food distribution, rather than having to get a pilot to fly a clattering old Antonov to drop not so accurately from very high up
· Your school in Malawi or Mozambique got flooded, because climate change: the first Windracers ULTRA brings a UNICEF school-in-a-box, the next, a school tent
· You live on the islands of Lake Malawi and Lake Victoria/Nyanza, Windracers ULTRA beats a once-every-few-days boat for a whole range of things – from post in to fish out
For the avoidance of doubt, there’s no inconsistency with the principle that cash is generally the best form of assistance: but the places where there are physical constraints on access to stuff are, as above, more numerous in rural Africa.
Similarly, there are already several impressive hotspots of drone pilot skills in countries in Southern and Eastern Africa: drones should make humanitarian logistics more local, less expeditionary.
The Code of the Wakandans
Windracers, who started in 2016, spinning out from University of Southampton (a place where people historically know a thing or two about aeronautical engineering and avionics) had this use case in mind since the start.
It was serendipitous to get the chance to join them half-time (alongside my work with Abyrint.com – see What C-Dog did next, part 1: “not so much big data, as many small data” (substack.com)), to try and make this road by walking it. And I hope imminently to be able to tell you about a first operation here in Africa.