Moving stuff by air may be quick and convenient, but it’s also horridly expensive, accounting for just 1 percent of global shipping by volume—and 35 percent of it by cost. So while autonomous drones dropping a few pounds of snacks or medical supplies are generating plenty of buzz, two Bulgarian brothers see an opening in the long-haul business. And they think they’ve got the tech to start flying hundreds of pounds of cargo over hundreds of miles, no pilot or 747 required. Svilen and Konstantin Rangelov are the CEO and chief technology officer, respectively, of Dronamics. They’ve spent the past four years developing an aircraft that can haul nearly 800 pounds of cargo up to 1,550 miles, a far cry from the 10 or 15 miles, or even just a few blocks, that most drone delivery services are targeting. “Most small delivery drones are an attempt to solve the last-mile problem,” Svilen Rangelov says. Dronamics is looking at the leg of the journey that comes before that. “They are the bike messenger, we are the cross-country truck.” The problem with the current air transport system, Svilen says, is that it relies on moving a few, very big, and very expensive airplanes between major airports. When combined with cost of getting goods from the nearest airport that can handle an airliner to their final destination, the costs pile up. If you’ve got the money; the time and distance requirements; and the bulk to justify sending your stuff by air, it works fine. Otherwise, not so much. “This is why domestic cargo flights are a rarity in almost all countries in the world,” Svilen says. The Rangelovs’ solution is a mission-tailored cargo craft called Black Swan. The fixed-wing aircraft, which uses a gasoline engine and a single nose-mounted propeller, can be monitored via satellite, fly into and out of small unpaved air strips, and could operate at a cost at least 50 percent lower than conventional, human-piloted cargo aircraft. A quarter-scale prototype with a wingspan of 13 feet—the final version will be the size of a conventional small airplane, thus far more substantial than the average sneaker-delivering quadcopter—flew in trials at military and civilian airports in Bulgaria over several months last year, with the engineers validating the aerodynamics, autopilot system, and satellite communications technology. The fixed-wing airplane is designed for the kind of lower density cargo typical of ecommerce deliveries, as opposed to heavy, tightly packaged pallets typically crammed into cargo planes. So for predominantly individually packaged and wrapped products like smartphones, food, medicine, and, sure, sneakers, “We focused on getting a payload that could match the most common type of ground vehicle in the world—the small cargo van,” Konstantin says. “This meant we can create an aircraft the size of a bush plane, and we could make it land at even very short runways, significantly expanding the number of towns that we can connect.”
Bulgaria-based Dronamics has developed autonomous drone technology designed to carry large loads of cargo for longer distances than existing delivery drones, and at a lower cost than current air transport. The company’s aircraft, known as Black Swan, can cover distances of around 800 pounds and carry loads of up to 1,550 miles. Cheaper to produce and run than conventional cargo aircraft, the drone will be the size of a small aeroplane, and is designed to carry lower density e-commerce type cargo, such as smartphones and medicine.