San Antonio – A team of medical experts and engineers at Knight Aerospace are designing unique medical units that can be placed inside a cargo aircraft.
Bianca Rhodes, President and CEO of Knight Aerospace, said its designed to keep the aircrew safe.
“It maintains negative pressure the entire time while its on the aircraft. So, that means that no germs can escape,” Rhodes said. “If you have anybody that’s contaminated or contagious, we want to protect the aircraft and we want to protect the air crew, so that they don’t have to worry about decontaminating the aircraft when it lands. They can just roll this thing off and it’s ready to go on a new mission and the crew is all safe.”
Knight Aerospace designed a unit for the Royal Canadian Air Force, which posted a video on Facebook showing the unit.
Rhodes said they have been using it to transport vaccines all over the world and for different missions.
“They ran a mission down to the African continent and back with some Canadians that they had to repatriate. You know, some of them were severely compromised with COVID and some of them were more ambulatory. And this platform gave them the ability to accommodate all of those patients,” Rhodes said.
The team at Knight Aerospace is working with different nations.
“We’re working on another medical module design right now, and it’s for one of our Middle Eastern customers,” Rhodes said.
With COVID-19 still impacting countries across the world, Rhodes believes this could help.
“I think part of the frustration with COVID has been the helplessness that everybody feels. Like there’s so little that you can do. And this gives us a sense of purpose and a sense of accomplishment, saying that whatever we could do, we are doing,” Rhodes said.
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