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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."
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."
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...
Autonomous GEVs would absolutely be stuff from Sci-Fi movies.
Ezekiel 23:20
Exactly. I'm not very thrilled by the prospect of a 140 foot 200,000 pound autonomous flying thing, staying below 400 foot (which is still plenty high enough to hurt when it falls from the sky, but not high enough for even a parachute to deploy (normally 600-1200 feet of free fall; reserve chutes open in about 400 ft)), which is being marketed as cheaper because it doesn't have to be safe enough for humans (read: they will fall out of the air from time to time).
In the best case, there will be 200,000 pounds of stuff and a wreck of vehicle dumped into the ocean not far from shore.
You are not going to beat cargo ships for costs and you're not going to beat air freight for speed -- what the hell is this startup's business case?
Agreed. It's actually kind of interesting--being able to handle things like waves and the like.
That said, I might be concerned about storms. For the most part, airplanes fly over storms and big honkin' container ships go through storms. But you start adding downdrafts, updrafts, waves, and the like and things could get interesting.
Also, while avoiding teh evul gubmint regulations is always amusing, I'd be a it concerned about reliability. I mean, I stick my package on a 747 cargo out of Singapore and I can be pretty secure that it'll show up. I stick it on a container ship and I feel the same way. But if I'm putting, say, $500,000,000 worth of iPhones on your flimsy boat, the insurance is probably going to be pretty outrageous.
When they're attitude is "Hey, we can wreck and it's no big deal!" while carrying half-a-billion dollars worth of cargo, these aren't the people I want to hire to transport my goods.
If only there was some way to predict and track storms?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
of uninhabited.
...isn't just about not falling out of the air.
It includes all sorts of things, from seats to air conditioning. Flying at lower altitudes keeps you from needing pressurization, but there's still all of those pesky "doors" and "instruments" and the like. With 30 hour flight times, you also need things like extra crew members and toilets and such.
Leaving humans out of the equation will save tens of tons on this sort of aircraft...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_effect_vehicle
While I found the article interesting, it also caught my attention that three of the four photos attached to that Wikipedia article show craft which appear to be either in storage or abandoned, and the fourth appears to be at an air show or museum of some sort. As far as I can tell, none of the vehicles appear to be functional.
#DeleteChrome
1/2 a billion dollar shipments will entail such planning that 3 weeks by shipping container won't be a great deal. The target market here is probably things like that new toy you ordered for next-week delivery on Amazon.
You are only talking about "forecasting" a number of hours ahead. The computer can just route around existing weather. It can even follow a route where radar is available for some acceptable portion of the journey. If they can't solve this problem, then they will be sunk - but I extremely skeptical that this will be what proves to be insurmountable.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Assuming this actually gets off the ground (pun intended), won't this affect airline pricing? Or are commercial airlines not doing freight?
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain... time... to... die...
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.
-Styopa
Can you make more smaller ones? Can they be monitored all the trip, to make sure they arrive safely? (Use "land pilots.").. I also find it ironic that they don't offer luggage transportation services.
somebody owns it and if you fly below controlled airspace then you're fair game. Pull!
Aren't they just slapping a, 'we invented it sticker' on this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... A design from the point of how to make a boat go faster, than how to increase cargo capacity of a plane, perhaps GEVs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... will make a comeback.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Aso, you get all the disadvantages of a boat and a plane at the same time. It has to be light enough to fly, strong enough to withstand a decent swell, waterproof, corrosion-resistant, aerodynamic, hydrodynamic⦠Flying boats were initially popular due to lack of suitable airstrips for larger aircraft. Now that we have airports everywhere, there's no case for it.
Yeah, the USSR built plenty of them, but only used them on inland seas (Caspian Sea etc.) and ultimately seemed to give up on the idea. This suggests they ultimately didn't achieve their goals and/or weren't suitable for use on open oceans.
Their CAD model appears to have two jet engines on it.
I also expect them to go turboprop on any actual design for efficiency. I'm not so sure about the landing at sea thing though. It's not a trivial thing to land 12 miles off shore. Most seaplanes of the era when these were popular had to land on inner harbours, or close to the lee of land masses, because a 2 ft wave when you are at landing speeds is not something easily dealt with by a lightweight airframe.
I'm sure they must have a wider strategy though, because it would seem rather pointless to try to start an airframe company from scratch to do this. It would be much easier to put their efforts into the autopilot/landing/safety/remote control software, and just go talk to Embraer or ATR about buying a ready-to-go airframe with the cockpit and life support systems stripped out.
It sounds like they are proposing a robot that is not up to the standards you have set. Half of this proposal involves ways to get around safety regulations. If you've flown big UAVs, you must be talking military, and yeah, these aren't going to meet your standards. Like I said, if they can't figure out the weather, then this thing is dead on arrival - presumably they've spent more time thinking about it than you or I.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Exactly. I'm not very thrilled by the prospect of a 140 foot 200,000 pound autonomous flying thing, staying below 400 foot
There are some places where uncontrolled airspace extends up to the bottom of Class A (18,000'), but darn few of them. Mostly, uncontrolled airspace extends from surface to either 700' or 1200' AGL.
But don't confuse the term "uncontrolled airspace" with "unmanaged" or "not within the FAA regulatory framework." As opposed to what another poster claims, aircraft flying in uncontrolled airspace are not "fair game".
There are some neat applications of sub-sonic high-speed drone swarms from US airframes, where they keep at speed, drop an entire cargo of drones to hunter killer the Russians, and then swoop in to pick them up - at speed.
Doing cargo drops and pickups sounds way easier. Plus nobody is trying to shoot the airframe down.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
You are also blissfully unaware how fast thunderstorms can develop and how significantly your radar horizon is shrunk by flying a few meters above the ground in a WiG vehicle.
Isn't this a matter for a satellite link? I don't see how putting a super-powerful radar is onto thousands of vehicles (weight-sensitive ones, even) is better than global observation. After all, the "global state" of the weather is shared.
Ezekiel 23:20