One-Hour Delivery Powered by Ground-Effect Electric Aviation

One-hour delivery is the holy grail of ecommerce. An arms race is taking place among retailers to secure it. Customers love it and fast delivery can often be cheaper too. Speed means the customer will likely be home to receive the package. This reduces expensive redelivery and porch theft. Moreover, your order will come directly from a mini-warehouse located close-by, eliminating routing hops and handling.

But therein lies the challenge: mini-warehouses in big cities only have space for the most popular products. What about the millions of other products you might buy infrequently?

Those will come from huge, sprawling fulfillment centers like this one below, outside of town where land is cheaper. They’ll be handed off to standard carriers like UPS. You’ll get your package in a few days.

Electric Aviation

Electric airplanes are here already. The Pipistrel below is certified by the FAA. Their size, range and payload are currently limited only by battery technology. But they can do short delivery hops where the powerpack can be swapped.

Airflow.aero aims to develop an electric airplane to do just that. It will carry a payload of 500 pounds. Interestingly, it boasts a “virtual arresting hook” that can dramatically shorten landing distance, just like on aircraft carriers. They‘re not giving much details on this. But I’ll venture that it has something to do with reversing propellers powerfully the instant the airplane touches the ground.

Their concept has a lot going for it. However, being a pilot myself I can tell you that the Bay Area airspace is already buzzing with many planes and helicopters. I wonder how practical it’ll be to add more aircrafts to it. A likely part of the answer is the use of uncontrolled low altitude.

Ground-Effect For Better Efficiency

Ground-effect occurs when an airplane flies close to the surface. Air forms a cushion under the wing increasing lift. Birds use it to fly longer distances with less effort over water. This sounds promising for increasing the short range of electric aviation.

Ground-effect aircrafts are nothing new. They’ve been experimented with for some decades. The AirFish below is one, made in Singapore. It’s not quite a real airplane as it cannot fly higher than 20 feet or so. In ground-effect AirFish can zip along with relatively modest gasoline engines. It boasts a range of 345 miles with a top speed of 120mph.

The Bay Delivery Superhighway

The San Francisco bay is central to its most populous cities. The bay is somewhat underutilized for transportation. It is also noise insensitive and largely free airspace at low altitude.

This sounds like the perfect testbed for a one-hour delivery superhighway experiment. Let’s use the bay to connect large scale warehouses to cities along its shores. For example, type “fulfillment center” in google maps and you’ll see some, like this one in Fremont built on reclaimed land by the water. Let’s use it for our thought experiment.

Currently, its delivery trucks have to cross bridges and battle traffic on some of the busiest highways in California. Needless to say, one-hour delivery is not an option. The bay however is wide open.

Ground-Effect Electric Delivery Aircrafts

So this thought experiment is about imagining how an electric delivery aircraft can solve the middle-mile challenge in the Bay Area. Our aircraft will travel mostly in ground-effect skimming the bay for speed and battery efficiency. It can do so without interfering with air traffic.

Unlike AirFish, we want ideally our aircraft to retain true flying capabilities. This will be useful for deliveries further away as airspace becomes less congested.

For example here’s below the Icon A5, a modern amphibious airplane. It is actually made in the Bay Area. The Icon A5 experiences ground-effect close to the surface, just like any aircraft. The AirFish is more efficient in harnessing it with its folded-down wings. But this efficiency comes at a price: its wings are too short to fly any higher. Aeronautics is all about tradeoffs indeed.

Consequently, our aircraft will likely be a hybrid between the AirFish and amphibious airplanes. Lightweight wing morphing technology is likely part of the solution. It will need precise altitude management and flight controls to fly safely at speed. Navigation in fog and bird strikes are also challenges.

The Bay Middle-Mile

So the whole catalog of products could now be delivered under an hour everywhere in the Bay Area using the water as the middle-mile superhighway. Most bay cities already have various kinds of waterfront facilities. San Francisco is particularly well-suited for this, it has many underused piers within walking distance of downtown.

That’s where electric delivery aircrafts could dock to unload packages for that destination. Packages could then be handled by local delivery vehicles such as electric scooters.

For example, a delivery to San Mateo would take 7 minutes of flight time, then 20 minutes for a scooter to make it to the farthest customer home. Adding 10 minutes for packaging and transfer time from aircraft to scooter, we have a total of 37 minutes.

A delivery to Richmond would require 39 minutes total, fulfillment center to door.

The return trip need not be empty. In fact, various other kinds of deliveries could be picked up for destinations across the bay as a service. Imagine ordering dinner from your favorite restaurant in San Francisco and having it delivered expeditiously to your home in San Jose before it gets cold.

Avoiding ATC Clearance

The bay is mostly free airspace at low altitude. However, San Francisco and Oakland airports do have 5 miles control zones starting at sea level, and abutting each other mid-bay. Permission is needed from one tower or the other to cross that part of the bay going north or south. Those are busy towers. This is a real challenge for anyone planning to use air vehicles for delivery, electric or not.

But our delivery aircraft might have an advantage due to its amphibious nature. It may be easier to obtain permission expeditiously when operating in ground-effect, as this wouldn’t interfere with regular aviation. Moreover, it may even be possible to avoid getting permission altogether when flying in contact with the water in those zones, albeit at a lower speed. In this fashion the airplane is technically a boat, needing no permission.

Cost Per Mile

Let’s use the Icon A5 as an example. It has an estimated operation cost of about $79 per hour. It can fly at 120mph. That’s a cost per mile of about 65 cents. Aviation fuel, oil and piston engine overhaul represent a significant portion of that bill. Of course, you wouldn’t have any of those with an electric aircraft, except for electricity itself.

By contrast, national operating averages for freight trucks is about $1.82 US per mile. Courier companies typically charge $1.50 to $2.00 per mile using vans.

A Perfect Fulfillment Location Hiding In Plain Sight?

The old naval airbase in Alameda has been abandoned for decades. The MythBusters of TV fame used it for various projects. It is about 1 square mile in size. Major highways 880 and 580 are close by. The port of Oakland is a few miles north. Its airfield has several runways, albeit in disrepair. The location is less than 5 miles away from downtown San Francisco as the crow flies. An electric delivery aircraft in ground-effect could reach the Ferry Building downtown in 3 minutes.

This seems to be a perfect location for a large scale fulfillment center that could easily reach everywhere in the Bay Area under an hour.

From this location the whole Bay Area becomes an addressable market for one-hour delivery.

However, it has to be said that this old base is currently a superfund site due to PCB contamination. But repurposing this site for one-hour ecommerce delivery might be just the thing to rehabilitate it.

One-Hour Delivery Worldwide?

That’s certainly the aspirational long term vision contemplated by retail giants and carriers. This will realistically be accomplished by local networks, AI-driven coverage logistics and facility-sharing. For anything intercontinental, we’ll just have to wait for those suborbital aircrafts Elon Musk talks about. Anywhere on Earth under 2 hours!

Meanwhile our ground-effect electric aviation delivery concept might be useful for other cities with waterways. New York comes to mind certainly, Seattle, Chesapeake Bay, Florida, etc. Other places in the world? How about the Mediterranean?

Read my new article titled Faster than Sea Freight — Cheaper Than Air Cargo. It explores oceanic hybrid-electric flying boats and how they will disrupt global ecommerce and make everything cheaper.

About The Author

Pierre is a software engineer for a major computer maker based in Cupertino. He likes to speculate about innovations in various domains such as aviation, cloud computing, AI and next-generation music streaming. He holds an FAA pilot license for airplanes, helicopters and sUAS.

All opinions and speculations presented here are strictly his own, and are unrelated to his day job and employer.