Name: 无人机如何改变航运业（How Drones Could Change The Shipping Industry）
Uploaded: 2021-06-06T17:01:59.000Z
Duration: 10 min
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Today, container ships transport more than 90 percent of all goods in

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the world and more than 4 trillion dollars worth of goods annually.

But it can take over a month for those goods to sail from Beijing to

By land, trucks move nearly 71 percent of all freight tonnage in the

Problem is, there's a shortage of truck drivers in the U.S.

So how do you speed up shipments while keeping personnel low?

The future of shipping looks very much unmanned.

Anything that has high levels of customization, anything that's

unpredictable, that should be done by air.

Many startups believe the answer is autonomous flying cargo drones

that can carry heavy loads and fly long distances.

All around the world, millions of people are benefiting from drones

already, and we're just at the tip of the iceberg.

The global drone logistics and transportation market accounted for

more than 24 million dollars in 2018, and that number is expected to

These drones could be the disruption needed in a global supply chain

that has been largely unchanged since the 1950's.

Getting large shipments of products across large distances is

difficult. That's why Malcolm McLean created the shipping container

This standardize the shipping industry and allowed shipping to scale

For a typical product that is being shipped from overseas and then

received within the United States, that would involve trucking, ocean

freights, in some cases we're seeing the emergence of more rail being

used as it's becoming a more reliable mode of transportation.

But now, with programs like Amazon's one-day shipping, consumers are

That means the standard shipping methods – ships and trucks – have to

There is a seemingly insatiable demand for things right away by

consumers and that just keeps growing and people become increasingly

What it seems like is the supply chains, which are wildly complex, are

built around the timeliness of air freight.

But the cost per item for air freight is significantly more expensive

when compared to sea and ground shipping.

We're at the point where you really need to have those high-value

goods or some kind of an emergency shipment would be an ideal

candidate for air freight because it cost so much.

billion tons of goods were shipped via truck, 1.8

billion tons were shipped via train, 740 million tons were shipped

via a cargo ship and only 5 million tons were shipped via airplane.

But using autonomous flying cargo drones to ship goods might bump

Air freight is actually a mode of transportation that has increased

dramatically. It's still a small percentage of all freight being

moved, but if you look at the percentage change over the years, air

freight has been growing much more rapidly.

I think a big reason for that is the growth of e-commerce.

If you're living in a small village and you want to ship goods and be

a 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

So when we bring autonomy and scale into aviation, every community

can be connected with the rest of the world through a airborne

And I think that that means massive potential for economic growth in

You just can't lift as much weight into the air as you can floated

along the sea, especially if you're trying 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, then standard fuel to fly off horizontally.

So, if you build an all-electric vehicle, you have an 85 percent mass

So that means you can carry 15 percent the rest of the weight in

payload, which doesn't really make sense for cargo delivery.

See, the more volume you carry, the cheaper shipping becomes, even if

Going in from Shanghai as an example, to the United States might take

about 28 days by ship, whereas by airplane it'll only take 14 hours.

A medium sized 2,000 pound box from Shenzhen, China to New York can

cost $1,200 by ocean, but it can cost $4,000 by air.

Natilus is working on getting that volume up and the costs down by

using jet fuel powered drones to autonomously fly goods long

Natilus is building large-scale unmanned aircraft the size of Boeing

747s to reduce global air freight costs by 50 percent.

It will do this by using a uniquely shaped vehicle designed for cargo,

not passengers, unlike other air freight carriers.

When Boeing and Airbus design airplanes meant for passengers, whatever

falls out is what the freight aircraft looks like and they're not

It also wants to utilize pilots more effectively. Instead

of having two pilots on one single flight, it hopes to use one pilot

There's a huge bottleneck with pilots today, which is limiting the

expansion of air freight as well as passenger freight.

But Natilus is still not ready to get its cargo drones into the air