Syria Airlift Project

Mark D. Jacobsen, an Air Force C-17 cargo pilot with a background in robotics and Arabic language expertise, witnessed the devastating humanitarian crisis unfolding in Syria around 2013. When the Syrian government began using starvation sieges as a weapon, Mark couldn't stop thinking about the problem. After conducting research among Syrian refugees in Turkey in 2014, he conceived of an audacious solution: use swarms of small drones to create an "air bridge" that could deliver aid into heavily defended airspace where traditional cargo planes couldn't penetrate.

Leveraging his unique combination of skills—Air Force pilot, robotics enthusiast, software developer, and Arabic speaker—Mark immediately began assembling a volunteer team. He spent months in his garage and at local parks experimenting with emerging drone technology. "These first months were incredibly difficult, involving dozens of crashes, multiple engineering re-designs, and countless meetings pitching to people who thought I was crazy." With access to Stanford engineers through his Ph.D. program, plus law students and nonprofit experts, Mark bootstrapped the operation with just $12,000 of his own money and $3,500 in prize money from an innovation competition. The team eventually proved they could reliably fly autonomous fixed-wing drones on 100-kilometer round-trip flights while dropping packages.

Mark's strategy was to achieve incremental milestones that would generate credibility and attract funding. He created a low-budget video of autonomous drones, conducted a professionally filmed demonstration in California involving Syrian refugees, and caught the attention of the BBC, which produced a documentary-quality video story. "A year after beginning the effort, we were reliably flying autonomous fixed-wing drone flights and dropping packages at roundtrip distances of up to 100km." These successes led to a crowdfunding campaign that raised $40,000, plus a $40,000 grant offer (which they declined).

The team's passion and relationships were their greatest asset—they attracted brilliant volunteers and genuine believers in the mission. However, several compounding problems emerged. The Syrian Civil War grew more complex with the rise of ISIS, Eastern Turkey became dangerous, and finding a path to actually deploy the technology proved nearly impossible. Many team members were simultaneously full-time Ph.D. students; Stanford faculty saw them as distracted from their real academic work. The engineering challenges of drone technology were relentless, and they lacked resources for proper systems engineering. In July 2015, a drone crash sparked a three-acre brush fire at Stanford, which became a personal inflection point for Mark. "I had a personal breakdown at this point... I couldn't sleep. I couldn't even check email without feeling overwhelming dread."

The project dissolved in December 2015 after eighteen months of operation, with remaining crowdfunded donations returned to charities supporting Syrians. Mark later leveraged lessons from this experience to found Rogue Squadron, a drone-focused software team inside the Department of Defense that grew to 15 full-time people and became "one of the most capable small drone teams in the United States government." He chronicled his journey through the nonprofit's failure in his book *Eating Glass: The Inner Journey Through Failure and Renewal*, emphasizing that while the project failed, it planted seeds that bloomed in unexpected ways—from conversations about drones for humanitarian good, to volunteers who went on to shape the drone industry, to his own pivot into government work.