Unmanned heavy-lift cargo drones could reshape the world of air freight. Jon Excell talks to Dronamics, one of the firms at the forefront of this aviation frontier.
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.