Aerial Transport for Remote Areas

Aim of the project was to carry out an in-depth market analysis, including risk analysis, undertake a feasibility study to gain a deeper understanding of the market and competitors, proving the technological feasibility as well as the economic feasibility and coming up with a business plan.
FlyingBasket is working on the design, production, operation and maintenance of remotely piloted aircraft systems and aims to offer a transport service with medium payloads of up to 100 kg.

The Drone Service market is expected to grow from 4.4B USD now to 64B in 2025 with a CAGR of 55%. Industries and applications for medium payload, short range commercial cargo drones include: cargo transport, grocery deliveries, monitoring for industries like remote hospitality, agriculture and forestry, construction, energy sector.

Today these markets are largely unexploited due to the following adoption barriers that are expected to be overcome in the next few years:
• Lack of drone pilots, drone operators
• unwillingness and/or inability of existing freight transport to start using these drones
• unwillingness and/or inability of end users in the above applications and industries to start using drones
• Safety and regulatory issues associated with commercial cargo drones
During the project, FlyingBasket was able to identify an initial market that is large enough to serve as a foundation for our drone business and that works within the existing regulatory and safety framework: remote hospitality. The initial application consists in a grocery delivery service by drone to hotels, restaurants, mountain shelters and other businesses located in hard to reach mountain and island areas.

We started carrying out an in-depth market analysis in order to discover the ideal starting market.
First of all we identified different industries: Agriculture and Forestry, Construction, Manufacturing, Energy, Logistics, Mining, Public Safety and others. For each of these industries we tried to find out, through internet research, papers, articles, competitor analysis, if drones are already in use in these industries, the estimation of the market size, expected growth of the market and if experts see potential for cargo drones.
For the most promising industries, we contacted leading companies in Europe and industry experts, organizing personal meetings and Skype calls.
This way we gained the following insights:
• Experts see the potential of cargo drones in all of these industries
• They are searching for somebody that offers a service with the drone
• There is no request for buying cargo drones yet
• There are not enough drone operators that would buy drones to operate them
Furthermore we were able to identify our initial target market and to come up with a new Business Model. We contacted potential customers in different industries and got different letters of interest of them.
On the technological side we were doing test flights and were able to prioritize adaptations of the drone based on the requirements of the market side. We came up with:
• Technological roadmap, based on our future goals
• IPR projection plan
We carried out an economic feasibility study, which resulted in a detailed profit and loss and cash-flow statement.
On the same time we also thought about the biggest risks and came up with strategies to mitigate them.

The project proposes a novel means of transport, enabled by high-tech drones combined with conventional road transport. It enables us to offer the flexibility of a helicopter at the cost of a van. All of this, while also substantially reducing the environmental impact of aerial transport.
We already did commercial cargo transport to remote Restaurants and proved that the solution works.

The potential impact goes far beyond the remote hospitality industry:
We have received letters of interest from companies in various industries.

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ATRA (Aerial Transport for Remote Areas)

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