California Company Plans Tests For Airfreight-Carrying Cargo Drones (siliconbeat.com)

Their ultimate goal is "a cargo drone the size of a jetliner" built with sturdy, light-weight carbon fiber composites and supplemental electric engines to reduce fuel consumption. Long-time Slashdot reader linuxwrangler writes: Backed by Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tim Draper, drone startup Natilus is attempting to reduce global airfreight costs by 50% through the use of autonomous cargo drones. To reduce regulatory and infrastructure burden, they plan to have their cargo drones take off and land on water 12 miles offshore and fly over uninhabited areas below controlled airspace. Shipments that take 11 hours in a 747 would take 30 in the drone but at half the cost. Container shipping is less than half the cost of the drone but takes three weeks. Test flights of a 30 foot prototype over San Pablo Bay north of San Francisco are planned for this summer.
The company hopes to start flying a 140-foot drone carrying 200,000 pounds by 2020, which Draper says will provide goods transportation "without the friction and costs associated with keeping people alive on airplanes."

Comments

Re:So it's dumb cause regulation?

[cirby]

They save a ton of fuel by flying higher at higher speeds - compared to how fast they're flying. They can actually save some money by flying slower, but people don't like taking too long to fly cross-country.

Jet engines also get higher thermal efficiency by flying higher, in colder air, but you can get better efficiency by using things like turboprops or propfans at lower altitudes and lower speeds. Up to about 500 mph, turboprops beat high-bypass jet engines by a wide margin in efficiency, and at lower speeds (200 mph), are almost 50% more efficient.

One of the problems with propfans is higher cabin noise, but an unmanned plane skips that issue.

The Natilus website shows regular old jet engines, but I bet that changes...

Just to be clear

[argStyopa]

Ocean freight is more typically 1/10th the price of airfreight.

Ie 40k lbs/19 metric tons from Munich to Chicago would be about $3500 by ocean, or about $34,000 by air charter.