Why Kerub exists
We are a Guatemalan company that has just started. This is the problem that made us begin, what we are building, and where we stand today.
Flying in Guatemala is a different problem. The country is mountain: ranges above three thousand meters, closed ravines, slopes under cloud for much of the year. When an aircraft goes down in that terrain, the accident is not where the difficulty ends. It continues in something simpler and harder: nobody knows exactly where.
The rescue teams go out anyway. They walk, they ask in the nearest villages, they fly over what the weather allows. Locating the wreckage can take days. And days matter, because in a mountain crash the difference between a rescue and a recovery is measured in hours.
Why it is still hard
Not for lack of drones. You can buy one almost anywhere today and it flies well. What you cannot buy is the whole chain: planning a sweep over terrain that rises and falls hundreds of meters, holding altitude over the ridges without losing resolution at the bottom of the ravines, covering the area while knowing with certainty what was covered and what was not, and delivering something a team in the field can actually use. Not a thousand photographs. An answer.
And all of it has to work with no signal, no power and no road. That is where generic solutions break.
What we believe
That this is not solved by buying a drone. It is solved by building the whole thing: the aircraft, the software that plans and flies it, and the procedure that turns a flight into useful information. When all three are your own, they can be tuned to one specific terrain, ours, instead of bending the terrain to fit a product designed for somewhere else.
That is why Kerub is a Guatemalan company working over Guatemalan geography. It is not a detail of origin: it is the reason our design decisions make sense.
Where we stand
Kerub has just started. We are in research and development: building our first aircraft, writing the ground station software, and testing in the field.
What this blog is about
Engineering. How we design the aircraft and why we chose each thing. How we plan a sweep that follows the relief. What we measured and what surprised us. And what broke, that most of all: in a project like this you learn more from what fails than from what works the first time.
We will not publish figures we have not measured.
We are starting out
There is a long way to go: the first aircraft is still in testing. But we start from a conviction. This technology is now within reach of anyone with a real problem to solve. Designing a drone for a specific need, rather than buying a generic one and hoping it fits, is possible today. We are engineers who specialize in drones, and that is exactly what we do.
We are starting with the problem closest to us: making the search for an aircraft in the Guatemalan mountains stop being measured in days.
If you work on something similar, or you need to fly over difficult terrain, get in touch.