How Drones Could Change The Shipping Industry

Today, container ships transport more than 90 percent of all the world's goods and more than $4 trillion worth of goods annually. But those products can take more than a month to arrive from Beijing to New York. By land, trucks move nearly 71 percent of all freight tonnage in the United States. The problem is that there is a shortage of truckers in the US. So how can you speed up shipments while keeping staff small? The future of

shipping

looks largely unmanned. Anything that has high levels of customization, anything that is unpredictable, needs to be done by air. Many startups believe the answer is autonomous flying cargo

drones

that can carry heavy loads and fly long distances.

Around the world, millions of people are already benefiting from

drones

and we are just at the tip of the iceberg. The global drone logistics and transportation market accounted for more than $24 million in 2018, and that figure is expected to grow to $1.6 billion by 2027. These drones

could

be the necessary disruption to a global supply chain that has been disrupted. remained virtually un

change

d since the 1950s. It is difficult to achieve large shipments of products over long distances. That's why Malcolm McLean created the

shipping

container in 1956. This standardized the shipping

industry

and allowed shipping to scale in ways that weren't possible before.

For a typical product that is shipped from abroad and then received within the United States, that would involve trucking, ocean freight, in some cases we are seeing the emergence of greater use of rail as it is becoming a most reliable mode of transportation. But now, with programs like Amazon's one-day shipping, consumers are looking for products that get to them faster. That means standard shipping methods (ships and trucks) need to be reevaluated. There is a seemingly insatiable demand for things immediately from consumers and that continues to grow and people become more and more impossible over time. What it seems is that supply chains, which are tremendously complex, are built around the punctuality of air transport.

But the cost per item of air freight is significantly more expensive compared to sea and land shipping. We're at the point where those high-value goods are really needed or some type of emergency shipment would be an ideal candidate for air freight because it costs a lot. In the United States in 2016, 11.6 billion tons of freight were shipped by truck, 1.8 billion tons by train, 740 million tons by cargo ship, and just 5 million tons by plane. But the use of autonomous flying cargo drones to ship goods

could

increase that number. Air travel is actually a mode of transportation that has increased dramatically.

It's still a small percentage of all cargo moved, but if you look at the percentage

change

over the years, air transportation has grown much faster. I think a big reason for that is the growth of e-commerce. If you live in a small town and want to ship goods and be part of a global economy, often your freight link is by road or rail and it takes quite some time for your goods to be transmitted around the world. So when we bring autonomy and scale to aviation, every community can connect to the rest of the world through an air cargo link.

And I think that means enormous potential for economic growth in communities around the world. The main challenge is volume. You simply can't lift as much weight in the air as you can floating along the sea, especially if you try to use battery-powered vehicles like many of the smaller drones we see today. Current battery technology is incredibly heavy. Volans-i, a drone company that has been working in this space since 2015, created a hybrid vehicle that uses electric power to take off vertically and then standard fuel to fly horizontally. So if you build an all-electric vehicle, you have an 85 percent mass fraction in the batteries.

That means you can carry 15 percent of the rest of the weight in payload, which doesn't really make sense for cargo delivery. Look, the more volume you carry, the cheaper shipping will be, even if that means traveling longer distances. Getting from Shanghai, for example, to the United States can take about 28 days by boat, while by plane it will only take 14 hours. But still the boats are cheaper. A medium 2,000-pound box from Shenzhen, China to New York, can cost $1,200 by sea, but can cost $4,000 by air. Natilus is working to increase that volume and reduce costs by using jet fuel-powered drones to autonomously fly goods over long distances, such as across the ocean.

Natilus is building large-scale drones the size of Boeing 747s to reduce global air transportation costs by 50 percent. It will do so using a uniquely shaped vehicle designed for cargo, not passengers, unlike other air cargo carriers. When Boeing and Airbus design airplanes intended for passengers, what is left out is the cargo plane aspect and they are not really optimized for volume. He also wants to use pilots more effectively. Instead of having two pilots on a single flight, he hopes to use one pilot who manages multiple flights remotely. Today there is a huge bottleneck with pilots, which is limiting the expansion of air and passenger transport.

But Natilus is not yet ready to launch its cargo drones into the air for deliveries. Companies like Volans-i have already started delivering to places like the Bahamas, a particularly difficult area for deliveries due to the long distances between islands. The company's goal is to ease the shipping stresses of expensive, high-need shipments, such as when a specific part on a production line needs to be replaced and must be replaced quickly, since time is money. I started Volans-i from a problem I saw while working at Tesla. Let's imagine that the Model 3 assembly line stops for an hour. That costs the company hundreds of thousands of dollars, in some cases millions of dollars.

And at that point, companies and businesses are motivated to achieve that uptime and get the line back up and running at any cost. And Volans-i is trying to help with that business and with that problem. Other companies are trying to lighten the burden of ever-critical last-mile delivery. That's the part of the shipping process that gets the product from its last warehouse or shipping center to your door, and tries to speed up the delivery of medical supplies and samples for testing. Zipline has been delivering supplies in Rwanda since 2016, Ghana since April 2019 and is expanding its service to the US this year.

UPS has partnered with drone startup Matternet to quickly ship medical supplies from a North Carolina hospital to labs for testing. I believe we can use this type of system to greatly improve healthcare in the country. So imagine how crucial it is to receive the result from the lab when you have to receive it on time. And with a system like this, we can deliver the samples and then the results much faster than with today's traditional transportation methods. But news about these delivery drones has been circulating for years. Prime Air, Amazon's drone delivery system, was teased in 2013 and has yet to implement the program, although Amazon recently announced it will launch delivery drones within months.

We're building all-electric drones that can fly up to 15 miles and deliver packages weighing less than five pounds to customers in less than 30 minutes. Well, I think the most important thing that is setting the pace of the development of the drone

industry

is regulation. FAA regulations are still quite strict regarding these autonomous flying vehicles, and that has created a challenge for these drones. Competition for airspace is becoming increasingly intense as drones of all sizes take to the skies. There have been some restrictions by the FAA that have restricted the use of drones for delivery to consumers' homes and, you know, that's something that needs to be overcome and that they continue to work on.

Autonomy raises a whole new set of public concerns, just as we've seen with self-driving cars, because the public has grown to appreciate the safety and security of being able to fly from one place to another. Regulators are hesitant to allow new technologies into the airspace until they are actually proven to be satisfactory. Another big concern when it comes to automation is jobs. Listening to some of the challenges around drones, that's one of the things I've heard come up. This entire workforce would be needed to be able to manage this drone network. But this technology could help alleviate some of the worker shortage facing the shipping industry.

I think what we're seeing today, the airline industry, for example, has a huge pilot shortage and it's only expected to get worse as the number of people who will travel by plane is expected to double in the next 15 years. . . But customers, shippers and regulators see promise in these autonomous flying vehicles for emergency deliveries, home deliveries at incredibly high speeds and even for large shipments of goods. So I think there's a huge opportunity here with unmanned cargo planes to start testing some of the technologies in a lower risk environment without people on board, and these same technologies can eventually be introduced into the planes that we'll use to fly around. the cities. to and from work.

And I'm really excited to skip the ground traffic too.