Flying organ transplants successfully on UAVs ‘is no dream’

ISTANBUL

As the field of usage for drones and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) has been expanding, these hi-tech vehicles can also contribute to the health sector by successfully transferring organ transplants, according to Mustafa Kaçan, the founder of DroneTürk, the leading platform for drone pilot training.

“Having some concerns about organ transplant is regular yet we don’t need to be frightened of these if they are being used actively in the world. It is possible to fly the transplants from one place to another, just within minutes,” said Kaçan, in a conference for UAVs, at Istanbul’s Atatürk Airport.

These drones and UAVs can fly transplants hassle-free because they do not function via controls but GPS systems, he added.

“The error margin is canceled out because it gets out of the pilot’s hands. A transplant can be done from one center to another within minutes. Because our hospitals are high-rise,” he said.

He also conveyed that if landing areas, similar to the ones for choppers, can be built on top of hospital roofs, “flying organ transplants in seconds is no dream.”

Currently 75,000 UAVs are registered in Turkey’s General Directorate of Civil Aviation, according to Kaçan, and some 30,000 pilots are licensed to use UAVs.

He expressed that to compensate the technological deficiencies in drones, a joint work can be conducted with Turkey’s Higher Education Board (YÖK) to establish departments in universities.

“We can also set up branches in vocational high schools,” he said.

Kaçan stressed that many municipalities have already been using drones and UAVs in many areas.

Istanbul’s Şile Municipality, for instance, distributes safety buoys via drones while another municipality uses it to detect unlicensed constructions by scanning the field, he said.