Food Flier

Photograph by Steve Harries for The New Yorker

A few years ago, a Royal Air Force wing commander visited the British aeronautics engineer Nigel Gifford, to discuss the idea of dropping aid from the sky to besieged civilians in Syria. Airdrops are extremely rare in urban environments; beyond the political obstacles, there are the logistical difficulties of landing giant pallets in small areas of a city. Even successful drops can endanger civilians. “While unpacking one and a half metric tons of food, you make yourself a very nice sniper target,” Gifford, a seventy-one-year-old former soldier, told me. “So I said to the commander, ‘I wouldn’t do it like that. I would build the aircraft out of food.’ ”

Now he has done so. The Pouncer, a hundred-and-forty-five-pound edible glider, with a ten-foot wingspan, is designed to be released from a cargo plane as far as sixty miles from its target. The fuselage is packed with grains; the Pouncer’s entire menu is customizable to cultural tastes and sensitivities. According to Gifford, in a complex humanitarian emergency—such as an earthquake in a mountainous area, with many villages but no usable roads—a plane could carry several hundred Pouncers, each programmed with different landing coördinates. The Pouncer has no engine, but its navigation system can adjust the wings to guide it to within twenty-three feet of its target.

The frame has some wooden components, but Gifford intends eventually to replace them with food. “Some parts can be made with a hard-baked, flour-based material that can be soaked in water and added to a meal,” he said. “My wife doesn’t like this, but I wander the supermarket aisles, playing with food, testing for tensile strength.” Dried, vacuum-packed meats show promise as landing gear.

—Ben Taub