The cargo hauling aircraft with no pilots on board

Svilen Rangelov sports an impressive beard. That’s eight years of growth, he says.

The beard dates back to when he and his younger brother, an aerospace engineer by training, founded Dronamics as Europe’s answer to the burgeoning cargo drone market.

He has agreed with his brother Konstantin that they will only shave their beards after the first flight of the drone they are building in their native Bulgaria.

At the time he founded Dronamics, major tech giants like Amazon were experimenting with drone deliveries to domestic addresses. But Mr. Rangelov never believed in the concept of personal goods delivered by drone.

The practical difficulties of flying a drone right to someone’s doorstep were clear to Mr. Rangelov. “We couldn’t get into the concept of small drones. We took a different approach.”

This approach to drone delivery will bear fruit when the prototype cargo plane takes to the air.

The drone, which looks very much like a conventional light aircraft but lacks a pilot’s cabin, combines “mobile economy” in terms of cheap electronics with the ability to land on short runways, Mr Rangelov says.

It will be known as the Black Swan.

“Here in Bulgaria, air freight means that a large aircraft loads goods onto a truck, which then drives to a sorting center where the shipment is disassembled for the next leg of its journey to each location.”

He believes that moving a smaller load to a short runway closer to the final recipient will reduce costs and take trucks off the road.

“There are 3,000 airstrips across Europe, that’s a lot of locations.”

Black Swan embodies a combination of lightweight composite materials (his brother’s specialty) and a standard piston engine, sipping gasoline while the drone flies on long and fuel-efficient wings.

This whole package will fly at 20,000 feet, below the mass of passenger air travel. Dronamics sees this altitude band as unused airspace and is also testing a new, synthetic aviation fuel that, according to its own statements, should enable climate-neutral flights.

The Black Swan’s payload of 350 kg (770 lb) is equivalent to that of a small van. “We connect city to city, not door to door.”

Dronamics plans to operate Black Swans like an airline, “Europe’s first drone cargo airline”. It is billed by weight or charter, reducing the cost and time involved in vehicles criss-crossing Europe to deliver essential goods and parts.

German logistics giant Hellmann is on the verge of deploying these drones. Responsible for this initiative is Jan Kleine-Lasthues, who can look back on a long career in air freight.

Mr. Kleine-Lasthues does not see these new developments as making conventional air freight competitive, but believes that the drones will enable Hellmann to fly goods that were previously transported by road.

Connecting Greek islands by cargo drone is one of Hellmann’s immediate goals, says Mr. Kleine-Lasthues.

“The drones will be more common than ferries and we can use them to split deliveries into multiple packages so we can increase delivery frequency. They represent a big change, they offer speed and flexibility.”

Dronamics claims a range of 2,500 km (1,500 miles) for its aircraft, putting all of Western Europe within range of any EU-based cargo hub.

While smaller versions of the drone are already flying in Bulgaria, a full-size prototype is scheduled to take off in early 2023.

According to Dronamics, the European Aerospace Agency was kept informed of its planned operations and was granted a limited license to operate. Hellmann is talking about flying them sometime in 2023.

Mr. Kleine-Lasthues agrees that previous drone delivery models were a dead end. “I never believed in the idea of ​​parcel drones. That’s why we work with Dronamics, it’s not an Amazon delivery idea.”

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Cargo drones have caught the attention of Bristow, a US group that operates helicopters around the world. Bristow has signaled its intention to buy up to 100 cargo drones from a California company, Elroy Air.

While the current generation of Evtol (Electric Vertical Take-Off) passenger designs are purely electrically powered, Elroy Air’s cargo drones are powered by a hybrid electric motor, a small turbine that generates electrical energy and consumes aviation fuel.

The hybrid design means the drone can refuel at existing facilities rather than relying on docking stations for power. And it burns less than a third of the fuel that a helicopter uses.

“Pure electrical power means you’re limited by the location of the charging station,” says David Stepanek, a former US Marine Corps helicopter technician who is now a senior officer in Bristow studying cargo drone operations.

Bristow is considering using the Elroy drones to support its operations in locations like West Africa, where the offshore oil industry needs to move equipment and Bristow wants to reduce the cost of deploying helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft.

Elroy Air has been working on a large, multi-engine, vertical take-off drone capable of lifting a 226 kg (500 lbs) load up to 480 km (300 miles).

Elroy Air’s Kofi Asante studied autonomous trucks at Uber’s freight division. He points out that the idea of ​​a cargo pod that attaches to and then detaches from the chassis of an autonomous truck also works for a cargo drone.

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He describes relations with the US regulator, the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA), as “very positive” with a full-size drone test flight planned for 2023.

With a width of over 8 m (26 feet), the drone named Chapparal is large for uncrewed civilian drones. But that size is the point, says Mr. Asante.

“It can carry 100 times the payload of a small UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle), it’s comparable to a small airplane in terms of load, but operates at a fraction of the cost of a helicopter.”

You may not be ordering flying drone delivery to your home address any time soon. But it looks like the death of a drone dream has paved the way for another, more practical concept.

And this should result in a clean-shaven lead at Dronamics.