Behind the first flight of the UAV across the sea, build the world's largest commercial unmanned transport aircraft

36 Krypton

2024-05-17 09:32Posted on the official account of Beijing 36Kr

Author: Wei Wen

Editor|Peng Xiaoqiu

In 2024, the low-altitude economy and eVTOL have become hot topics in the venture capital circle.

This wave is like seeing the early stages of electric vehicles, and different eVTOL companies are aiming in different directions. Hard Krypton learned that Aerospace Times Feipeng Co., Ltd. from Kunshan recently successfully completed the first domestic UAV cross-sea air transport mission. The aircraft that undertook this cross-sea mission is the FP-98 Leo, which is currently the world's largest commercial unmanned transport aircraft.

Aerospace Electronics (SH 600879), SF Express, and Guyu Capital are the investors behind Aerospace Feipeng. On April 24, as soon as the news of the completion of the cross-sea air mission came out, the indirect shareholding of Aerospace Electronics was limited on the same day. Previously, the figure of Aerospace Feipeng often appeared in CCTV news.

Hard Krypton visited Aerospace Feipeng in April to reveal the mysterious drone manufacturer of the low-altitude economic track.

The space system began to start

The world's largest commercial unmanned transport aircraft

The birth of the world's largest unmanned transport aircraft began with a tacit cooperation.

In 2013, Amazon started drone delivery, focusing on the last mile; At the same time, a wave of drone entrepreneurship has begun in China, with consumer drone leader DJI and agriculture-focused XAG Technology starting their drone businesses.

At that time, SF Express, the leading company in the domestic logistics industry, had already started the planning of the UAV territory: the three-stage air transport of trunk large manned transport aircraft, regional large UAVs, and terminal small UAVs was fully deployed.

10 years later, that is, in 2024, the domestic low-altitude economic track has started a new round of heat. Whether it is a manned drone or a cargo drone, it is in full swing.

In fact, UAVs with a range of 10 kilometers have already entered the stage of white-hot competition, which also shows that the barriers to competition in this market are not so high. Because whether it is giants such as SF Express, Meituan, or DJI, XAG, or other aircraft companies that focus on UAVs, they all have mature multi-rotor models on 10km UAVs.

But the range rose to 100 km, 1000 km, and when the drone became huge, competitive barriers began to appear.

At that time, SF Airlines, a subsidiary of SF Holdings, was already the cargo airline with the largest number of all-cargo aircraft operating in China, but they also hoped to find a team to develop large drones in the market to complete the replacement of drones in regional logistics.

Liu Zefeng, CEO of Aerospace Feipeng, told Hard Krypton that SF Express found the Ninth Academy of Aerospace (note: the Ninth Academy of Aerospace Technology generally refers to the China Academy of Aerospace Electronics Technology, which is affiliated to the China Aerospace Science and Technology Group). Since 2005, the Ninth Academy has been developing unmanned aerial vehicles, and technologies such as navigation, control, remote sensing and mapping, and computers are the core of the Ninth Academy, and these technologies are also the key technologies of unmanned aerial vehicles.

In November 2017, the two parties signed a cooperation agreement, SF Express hopes to have a large-load and long-range unmanned transport aircraft, and the technical strength of the Ninth Academy fully meets their conditions.

Li Chun, the investor behind Aerospace Feipeng and a partner of Guyu Capital, recalled to Hard Krypton that from 2017 to 2018, it took only 8 months for the team of the Ninth Academy to transform the manned model into a drone and successfully fly, which proved the team's technical ability and execution.

Guyu Capital is a RMB institution founded in 2011 with a management scale of RMB 5 billion, and has successfully invested in star projects such as SF Holdings, Zhongji InnoLight and J&T. Focusing on the ecology of the invested companies and based on the thinking of the supply chain, Gu Yu incubated Aerospace Feipeng in 2020 with the Ninth Academy of Aerospace Science and SF Express, and the "low-altitude economy" was written into the government work report for the first time four years later.

One detail is that on the basic structure and power foundation platform of a mature transport aircraft, the team of the Ninth Academy has made an unmanned design for it.

In 2019, SF Express and the Ninth Academy of Aerospace Science and Technology Co., Ltd. commercialized the project as a joint venture. Liu Zefeng said, "At that time, it was an instant hit, and the research and development of large-scale UAVs required a lot of capital, and even more importantly, institutional mechanisms. It has also explored the model of central enterprises producing talents and technology, and private enterprises producing capital and markets. "Aerospace Feipeng landed in 2020 and became a mixed-ownership enterprise.

Li Chun explained that within Guyu Capital, the positioning of the Aerospace Feipeng project is industrial mergers and acquisitions. The reason is that Gu Yu independently spun off Aerospace Feipeng from the listed company Aerospace Electronics Group. The investors behind Aerospace Feipeng have become Guyu Capital, SF Group, and Aerospace Electronics.

At present, Aerospace Feipeng's FP-98 "Leo" unmanned transport aircraft has been delivered for commercial use, with a price of tens of millions; It has a cargo weight of 1.5 tons and a maximum range of 1,200 kilometers.

FP-98 "Leo" unmanned transport aircraft

On April 18, Zhang Yajun, deputy director of the East China Regional Administration of Civil Aviation, issued the FP-98 UAV system type certificate (TC) to Aerospace Feipeng; On April 24, the FP-98 "Leo" UAV successfully completed the first cross-sea airlift mission of shrimp seedlings. It is reported that Aerospace Feipeng has also reached a cooperation intention with relevant parties, and plans to use this route (a low-altitude drone logistics cross-sea transportation route from Hainan to the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area) as a normalized operation.

Commercial operation of a drone company

Different from many UAV manufacturers, Aerospace Feipeng is one of the few full-model layout manufacturers in the current track.

Its products include "double thousand, double hundred, double ten" series, corresponding to trunk lines, branch lines, and terminal logistics.

First of all, "double thousand" refers to a flight radius of 1000 kilometers and a load capacity of more than 1 ton, Aerospace Feipeng has FP-98 "Leo" (formerly known as FH-98), that is, this 1.5-ton large UAV with SF Express; "Double Hundred" is a flight radius of 100 kilometers and a load capacity of 100 kg, and Aerospace Feipeng has a composite wing model FP-981C "Sagittarius"; "Double Ten" is a 10-kilometer radius, 10 kg load, multi-rotor UAV FP-981A.

Aerospace Feipeng product series diagram

Liu Zefeng revealed to Hard Krypton that the construction of the entire product system takes into account the problem of civilian scene coverage. The 100-kilometer flight radius product can cover the distance between the vast majority of the province's in-depth cities, and the 10-kilometer flight radius product basically considers the city's terminal logistics and county economy.

From the perspective of business model, the future of drone companies is to provide systematic solutions. Liu Zefeng, for example, Hikvision started with camera displays, but now it can provide regional and urban security solutions; Huawei and ZTE are core terminals, but they can actually provide operators with a complete set of communication solutions, from tower construction, communication base stations, to home layout.

Li Chun also believes that UAV companies should be good service providers, and the proportion of services in the reasonable revenue structure of Aerospace Feipeng in the future needs to be larger. "From the perspective of customer needs, in addition to directly purchasing drone products of various models and sizes, customers will also put forward many needs for scenario operations, so operational capabilities are equally important."

For example, when Aerospace Feipeng cooperated with Kunshan Fire Fighting, it carried two fire-extinguishing bombs under the multi-rotor model.

Multi-rotor model

In addition to FP-98, Feipeng also has a large vertical composite wing UAV product - FP-981C "Sagittarius", which has a load of 100 kg and can be used in cross-island and mountainous transportation, disaster rescue, coastal patrol and search and rescue.

FP-981C "Sagittarius" vertical composite wing UAV

Liu Zefeng said that the drone is operated through a program, which reduces the time for the pilot to familiarize himself with the instrument. No pilot training or experience is required to increase efficiency in a quick and easy way. Especially in the plateau, Gobi Desert, and islands, the problem of high cost of land transportation has been solved.

However, for the commercialization scenario, it cannot be solved by a single drone equipment company at present, and it needs to be made up at all levels. For example, if you use airplanes to transport cash crops from rural areas to cities, you first need large-scale centralized procurement in towns and towns, and then use drones to transport them to reduce the overall transportation cost.

As the technology and regulatory policies become more mature in the future, "perhaps drones will have various players like automobiles and civil aircraft." Drones will also have traffic lights, insurance, aircraft culture, training and other industries, and even buildings, and people's consumption patterns will also change at that time. Of course, once the market operator matures, Feipeng will become an aircraft manufacturer like COMAC, and drones will also become a huge industry like automobiles, Liu Zefeng said.

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