All eyes on the sky

A bolt of inspiration hit Eric Peck while serving as a RAAF Hercules pilot eight years ago in Afghanistan.

- ALAN DEANS

Fact file

Eric Peck

Co-founder of Swoop Aero, a drone-based delivery business operating in Australia and Africa; age 31; lives in the Melbourne suburb of Balaclava

Strived to earn good marks at school and to overcome difficult challenges. First job at Boost Juice. As a kid he wanted to be an RAAF pilot and later lived the dream. It was “the hardest job you could possibly do”. Got the flying bug after his uncle took him to the Avalon Airshow in Victoria. Most important investment lesson was being taught to be accountable for what he spent. Utimate goal is to run an ASX-listed company.

“I saw how drones were being used to track soldiers on the battlefield,” he recalls. “It piqued my interest, because my parents had just moved to a farm, and I thought maybe they could track their cows that way.”

The seed took shoot four years later after Peck had left the RAAF and was working at professional services firm Deloitte. There he met a robotics engineer, Josh Tepper, who had been asked by government agencies whether drones could be used to move chemotherapy medication to remote places.

“There’s normally a hospital within about 100-150 kilometres of most smaller healthcare facilities in the country, and there was only about a kilo of medication that needed to be moved,” says Peck. “We stepped back and said, ‘Well, how could we build a system to deliver that safely, reliably and sustainably every day of the week?’ We looked around the world and realised that introducing air transport into the last mile of the supply chain was a really obvious solution.”