In the Russia-Ukraine war, every new way to kill seems to invent a new way to save.
Ukraine recently demonstrated an uncrewed drone that can the job of a medevac helicopter.
Anywhere else, this would likely be considered a terrible idea. But this is Ukraine, where desperation is the mother of invention.
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In our In the Shadows episode Drone war Medics, wounded soldiers described the agony of waiting for hours, sometimes days, for a way out.
The golden hour of trauma care for saving lives and limbs has been shattered by this war.
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We watched the Azov Brigade pioneering desperate measures, including blood delivery by drone.
And now, drone airlifts. They call the tool Stargate.
Its makers say it grants something extraordinarily hard to come by on this battlefield.
“Right now with the Stargate we can give to the wounded soldier a golden chance basically to be evacuated in the matter of minutes,” said a representative from Ukrainian military tech company Skyfall.
Skyfall says Stargate can fly about 9 miles one way, at up to 65 miles per hour.
Stargate is now in early combat testing with frontline units, according to Skyfall.
The company is also behind the vampire heavy hexacopter known as Baba Yaga, a drone built to carry high-explosive payloads.
In the Shadows covered some of the earliest of efforts to use unmanned ground vehicles to rescue wounded soldiers. The odds of those vehicles making it through are no better than a coin toss.
Unmanned aerial evacuations face some of the same threats: the enemy may spot the drone and tries to take it out, most often with another drone.
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With UGVs, loss of signal can mean loss of life. Same thing in the air. The attempted solution here involves artificial intelligence.
“The drone has several AI functions that allows it to operate even in the environment of GPS denied situations or in the environments of other spoofing, blocking of the frequencies. In this case, the drone is fully autonomous,” a Skyfall representative said.
Skyfall wont say how the testing is going. But if it works, the golden hour gets a second life.