The rise of the heavy-lift cargo drone

Disruptive innovations often have the most unlikely origin stories. 

In the case of the Black Swan - a fixed-wing unmanned drone that promises to reshape the world of airfreight - it was its inventor’s hankering for Bulgarian cheese that kicked things off. 

In 2014, whilst studying aerospace engineering at university in the Netherlands and unable to find this taste of his homeland in any of his local stores, Konstantin Rangelov was jokingly encouraged by his brother Svilen to use his engineering skills to figure out a solution.

Just over ten years later, what began life as a lighthearted effort to design a small remotely operated aircraft that could bring him his favourite snack has evolved into Dronamics, a company with hundreds of employees, a fleet of unmanned aircraft and an ambition to transform the lucrative world of air freight. 

At the heart of this mission is the firm’s flagship vehicle the Black Swan: an 8 metre long, 16m wingspan unmanned drone capable of carrying a load of up to around 350kg some 2,500km (equivalent to the distance between London and Istanbul) and which is claimed to be 80 per cent faster, 50 per cent cheaper and up to 60 per cent less emitting than alternative approaches to freight transport.

Konstantin Rangelov - Dronamics

The carbon fibre, propeller driven aircraft - which is roughly the size of a Cessna - carried out its first successful test flight in May 2023 from Balchik airport in Bulgaria and has since performed hundreds more flight tests which have enabled the team to tweak and refine the technology. With commercial deals now in place with customers including ELTA Hellenic Post in Greece, Emirate Post group in the UAE and Qatar Airways Cargo, the aircraft is now poised to enter commercial service. 

Outlining his vision to The Engineer, Konstantin Rangelov - now CTO of Dronamics (his brother Svilen is CEO) - said that drones have a number of major advantages over existing approaches to air freight. “You’re only moving the assets, you’re not moving crew , you’re not over complicating the system with having life support systems and the safety features that are required when you have a person on board,” he said.  “The cost drops down significantly for both manufacturing, licensing, operations, maintenance and everything.”

He added that the technology also offers a potential solution to the aviation sector’s impending pilot shortage. According to estimates by Airbus and Boeing, there will be a need for more than half a million new pilots between now and the end of the next decade.

Whilst the prospect of unmanned cargo drones cluttering airspace may concern some, dealing with the unexpected can be a lot more straightforward if there’s no human on board.  “With the pilotless aeroplane, if somehow we lost control of it, or somebody was hijacking it…we can always as a last-ditch effort shoot it down,” said Rangelov.  Though clearly an undesirable outcome, this obviously isn’t an option for manned aircraft. 

Considering the list of advantages, it’s no surprise that a number of organisations are exploring the opportunity. As previously reported by The Engineer, UK firm Skyports has been trialling the use of drones for delivering medical supplies and mail to remote communities in the UK, whilst offshore wind giant Ørsted last year announced that it was using heavy-lift drones to supply cargo to turbines at Borssele wind farm off the coast of The Netherlands.

And - whilst estimates vary - the analysts are also getting excited. Indeed, a 2023 Frost & Sullivan report exploring the potential of heavy lift drones (which it defines as drones capable of lifting 30kg or more) predicted the sector to be worth $1.91 billion by 2031.

This growth is currently somewhat hindered by a patchwork regulatory climate. Across Europe, for instance, whilst the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) permits for beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) providing certain criteria are met, the ultimate decision on whether to allow operations rests with member state aviation authorities. In the UK, BVLOS operation has only been allowed as part of strictly controlled trials, but the Civil Aviation Authority is currently considering proposals to relax the laws.

For now, with regulations widely expected to open up in the short to medium term, it’s very much a waiting game for innovators in the sector. But Rangelov is confident that when the time comes, Dronamics - which has already become the first drone cargo airline to obtain that EASA certification - is well placed to play a leading role in the sector.  

One factor that he believes sets Dronamics’ technology apart is its relative simplicity. “While everybody else is busy making the Rolls Royce of aeroplanes, we’re making the Dacia or the Lada,” he said. “The aeroplane is really simple and cheap to manufacture and operate and maintain, which basically means that the cost is orders of magnitude lower than the alternatives.” 

Rangelov estimates that the prototypes built so far have cost around a million Euros each, an impressive enough figure for a new aircraft of this type. However, if plans to scale up production and move towards mass manufacture are realised, he believes this cost could ultimately get down to around 300,000 Euro per aircraft. 

Meanwhile, the focus on affordable and instantly deployable solutions has led the team to opt for a traditionally-fuelled powertrain, rather than investing resources in experimental electric or hybrid systems.

At the heart of this effort is a multifuel system that Rangelov says is able to switch between different fuels. This, he said, will be key to democratising the technology and the regions in which it can be deployed:  “If you have clients in Northern Europe where people are much more conscious about the environment and are willing to pay a premium for a delivery that’s using sustainable fuels, the same plane that will be operating there may be operating….somewhere else where people have barely access to clean drinking water, let alone gasoline. So whatever fuel they have, we need to be able to accept it.”

Alongside the engineering of the actual aircraft, the team has also given careful thought to how the aircraft are operated and devised a system which uses a tag team of remote pilots: two on the ground at the sending end, two on the receiving end, and then a third team at a central point which manages the handover of the flight.  Whilst the aircraft is, he said, capable of fully autonomous operation, this is part of a conscious effort to drive early confidence in the system by playing it safe and using more ground control than the regulations actually call for.

It’s this bringing together of design, manufacture and operations that really gives Dronamics the edge, claimed Rangelov. “It doesn’t make sense for us to outsource aeroplanes, so somebody else manufactures them and we just use them. Or it doesn’t make sense that we sell the aeroplanes, because then they’re out of our control. So we figured that it’s better for us to actually close the loop, close the whole circle around design, manufacturing and operations.

It’s a big ask for a new company, but Rangelov believes that in the longer term, taking on all of the risk for clients and removing the need for them to invest in the design and manufacture of aircraft offers the best chance of success in this exciting nascent sector: “We knew that it was going to be a monumental task to do all three. But in the long run, it’s going to be cheaper for us, it’s going to be much safer in terms of operations and we’re going to be much quicker in terms of iterations of design changes.”