Bell tested a transport drone with 110 pounds of cargo near Fort Worth. How’d it go?
Fort Worth-based Bell is developing a pilot-less drone that not only flies like a miniature version of a tilt-rotor aircraft, but also can carry much heavier cargo than previously thought.
The Autonomous Pod Transport — or APT — recently completed a test in which it successfully carried 110 pounds of payload weight for more than eight miles, Bell officials said.
The test was conducted Dec. 9 at a site near Mineral Wells, west of Fort Worth.
The APT comes in two sizes. The APT-20 is about three feet tall and five feet wide — roughly the dimensions of a card table — whereas the APT-70 is closer to six feet tall and nine feet wide, about the size of a small car.
Both versions are powered by an electric hybrid propulsion system with four propellers. They look like larger, sturdier versions of drones used for aerial photography, or for flying as a hobby.
The APT can take off like a helicopter, then tilt its rotors and fly like a fixed-wing, bi-plane aircraft, covering up to 35 miles in about a half-hour of flight time.
Bell envisions eventually selling versions of the APT in both sizes for military, medical and commercial uses. More than 300 test flights have already taken place, and more are scheduled over the next couple of years.
Before the most recent test, the larger APT had been billed as capable of carrying up to 70 pounds of freight — roughly the equivalent of 36 meals ready to eat, 72 water bottles, 64 magazines of 5.56 ammunition and a gallon of fuel. But those working on the APT project are finding that their unmanned vehicle can actually carry much more than that, while still maintaining stability in flight.
The additional weight capacity is a tremendous advantage when it comes to calculating how much weight per hour can be moved in a given area — whether it’s a military battlefield or perhaps a commercial industrial area or an oil or mining field, said John Wittmaak, manager of Bell’s autonomous aircraft program.
“The aircraft is far more capable than we originally thought,” Wittmaak said in an interview. “We are developing the ability to carry significant payload to multiple sites in one mission. We can fly a jerrycan to one site and medical site supplies to another location and maybe one other location before returning to base. That’s also applicable on the commercial side.”
The tests are part of Bell’s contract with NASA to develop commercially viable unmanned aircraft capable of operating in urban areas such as the Dallas-Fort Worth region, which has a population of more than 8 million and extremely busy and complicated air space — including DFW Airport, Alliance Airport, military installations and private aviation activity.
The Bell APT appears to perform a step beyond Amazon’s Prime Air delivery drone, which was unveiled last year and is in development. Amazon’s autonomous vehicle is designed for smaller packages of a few pounds.
Bell also is partnering with Uber to develop an air taxi service dubbed Uber Elevate, which aims to being shuttling people between two test pad sites — or “vertiports” — at DFW Airport and Frisco possibly as soon as 2023.
This story was originally published December 23, 2020 at 5:30 AM.
