Pipistrel and Amazilia Aerospace to build new hybrid VTOL cargo aircraft for SF Express, planned for 2023 launch

Pip­istrel will work with Amazil­ia Aero­space, a sub­sidiary of Chi­nese inte­grat­ed logis­tics provider SF Express, to design and build an unmanned VTOL hybrid air­craft ready for deploy­ment by 2023.

Under the agree­ment, Amazil­ia Aero­space will devel­op an advanced dig­i­tal flight con­trol and vehi­cle man­age­ment sys­tem, while Pip­istrel will also man­u­fac­ture the air­craft. It will be tar­get­ed at reach­ing remote and iso­lat­ed areas in Chi­na, car­ry­ing more than 300 kg of car­go in a 2.3m³ vol­ume space over a range of 500 km. It will achieve cruis­ing alti­tudes up to 6,000m and VTOL capa­bil­i­ty up to 2,500m above sea lev­el.

The air­craft will be equipped with eight ver­ti­cal-lift pack­ages each con­sist­ing of a Pip­istrel E‑811 EASA Type cer­ti­fied pow­ered rotor with high­ly effi­cient and redun­dant bat­tery packs, assur­ing safe oper­a­tion even if two rotors are inop­er­a­tive.

The air­craft design and com­po­nent pro­duc­tion of the pro­to­type will be car­ried out at Pip­istrel’s facil­i­ties. Flight test­ing with the Amazil­ia Aero­space sys­tem in Europe will be fol­lowed by oper­a­tional val­i­da­tion in Chi­na start­ing in 2022. By 2023, SF Express intends to deploy the car­go drone fleet in their domes­tic and non-domes­tic busi­ness oper­a­tions.

Ivo Boscarol, Pip­istrel Founder and CEO, said: “To be cho­sen by one of the largest logis­tics com­pa­nies glob­al­ly to design and pro­duce a tai­lor-made line of vehi­cles for aer­i­al car­go trans­porta­tion is a sol­id recog­ni­tion of Pipistrel’s capa­bil­i­ty built up on more than a decade of achieve­ments in elec­tric flight.

“We look for­ward to becom­ing even more involved in strate­gic busi­ness solu­tions on a glob­al scale, where our vehi­cles will change how aer­i­al logis­tics work and have fur­ther sig­nif­i­cant impacts to sus­tain­abil­i­ty and qual­i­ty of life.“

Amazil­ia Aero­space’s Auto­mat­ic Flight Con­trol Sys­tem and Vehi­cle Man­age­ment Sys­tem includes both the avion­ic hard­ware and the soft­ware capa­ble of automat­ing the entire car­go mis­sion.

It can be inte­grat­ed into both VTOL and con­ven­tion­al air­craft con­fig­u­ra­tions and been designed specif­i­cal­ly to meet the require­ments for large scale oper­a­tions by logis­tics com­pa­nies, such as SF Express.

Amazil­ia Aero­space builds on years of research at the Tech­ni­cal Uni­ver­si­ty of Munich (TUM), rein­forced with aero­space indus­try expe­ri­ence. The team will devel­op and deliv­er a sys­tem which is com­pli­ant to aero­space indus­try stan­dards. It will be com­pat­i­ble with the eco­nom­ics of unmanned aer­i­al car­go trans­port, and both scal­able and ver­sa­tile.

Dongqi Li, SF Express Vice Pres­i­dent & SF UAS Chair­man, said: “Our efforts to achieve 36-hour coun­try­wide deliv­ery through­out Chi­na face sig­nif­i­cant chal­lenges, such as nat­ur­al bar­ri­ers, under­de­vel­oped logis­tics infra­struc­ture, and more, espe­cial­ly in rur­al Chi­na. SF Express intends to adopt car­go VTOL drones to solve this bot­tle­neck due to their flex­i­bil­i­ty and high speed, which is on par with heli­copters, and has low costs which are com­pet­i­tive with truck deliv­ery.

“The high-alti­tude capa­bil­i­ty allows us to extend our civ­il air car­go ser­vice cov­er­age to even dif­fi­cult to reach moun­tain­ous areas. We believe VTOL drones will become a major vehi­cle in Chi­na, and SF Express alone will need more than 1,000 in the next 10 years.”

Pip­istrel launched its own series of unmanned car­go air­craft last year, which includes the flag­ship Nuu­va V300 and small­er V20 mod­el. The V300 is planned to be in ser­vice for the sec­ond half of 2023, with Hon­ey­well devel­op­ing its fly-by-wire sys­tem and the crit­i­cal sen­sor and nav­i­ga­tion tech­nol­o­gy.