Cargo drone developer Dronamics says it has successfully completed the first flight of its flagship aircraft, the Black Swan. The remotely piloted cargo freighter took off from Balchik Airfield in northeast Bulgaria and flew for 10 minutes and 30 seconds, reaching an altitude of 2,000 feet.
The UK-based start-up aims to both produce and operate a fleet of cargo drones that will reduce the cost of shipping to and from remote areas. “We don’t only want to create a new type of cargo drone. We need it to be cheaper to produce and to operate than existing ways of doing so,” Dronamics co-founder Svilen Rangelov told FutureFlight.
Rangelov, whose background is in economics, founded Dronamics in 2014 together with his brother Konstantin Rangelov, an aerospace engineer. Svilen said he and his brother were inspired to create a cargo drone airline after seeing Amazon’s delivery drones.
“When we saw the Amazon drones, we realized maybe technology is getting to a place where we could separate the humans from the vehicles in the air, which gives you the opportunity to size the vehicle precisely to the loads.”
Having grown up in Bulgaria in the 1990s, when the country's economy was still in post-communist flux, the brothers “were made painfully aware about how if you’re not in the center of commerce you always end up paying more for everything that you import or export,” Svilen said. “That kind of stuck with us.”
According to Dronamics, the remotely piloted aircraft only needs about 1,300 feet (400 meters) of runway space to take off and land. It has a fixed wing with a 52-foot (16 meters) wingspan, and it takes off and lands just like conventional airplanes. It uses gasoline-powered Rotax engines for now, but Dronamics is looking to incorporate synthetic aviation fuel and hydrogen propulsion systems into its plans for the future.
“We’re starting with a Rotax engine that runs on gasoline simply because it already exists and does not need additional certification, so it’s a quick path to commercialization,” Svilen said. “We also are realists and know that as much as we want it, the ‘green revolution’ is not going to happen overnight, so there will be a transition period, and we need to make sure our platform is future-proof and therefore capable of using different types of fuel.”
Dronamics has already acquired an air operator’s certificate and plans to start commercial operations in Europe by the end of this year, Svilen said. Eventually, the company intends to convert the Black Swan to hydrogen propulsion and it is working with the UK's Cranfield Aerospace Solutions on a propulsion system. The intial mode is powered by a horizontally-opposed, four-stroke Rotax engine that could run on biofuels.
