Popular Science explains the 9.000-pound flying robots made by the drone company Elroy Air aren’t meant to get your packages to your door. They’re just flying them most of the way there:
The drone in question is called the Chaparral, which Elroy took the wraps off of earlier this year.
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The Chaparral isn’t small: It measures about 27 feet across, 19 feet long, and weighs some 1,900 pounds. The wing can be rotated so that the drone takes up less space in storage or transport. If you stood next to the tail, you’d find that it is taller than you, unless you stand about 7 feet in height. The aircraft can schlep about 300 to 500 pounds in a pod below its belly, and has a range of some 300 miles, meaning it could make it from New York to Boston. It’ll travel at speeds faster than 100 mph. The plane is autonomous—no pilots needed—and it can take off and land vertically.
In short, think of it like other large flying machines that companies like Joby, Wisk, and Beta have in development; those craft are called eVTOLS, for electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft. But unlike some of Elroy’s peers in this next-chapter-of-aviation space, the Chaparral aircraft is hybrid electric, not purely electric. It features 8 rotors on its wings to help it take off and land vertically, and four propellers for forward flight, and all of them are driven by electric motors. However, the source of that electricity is what makes this craft unique: it has a gas turbine and generator inside it to make that juice.
Within the aircraft, the gas turbine (it burns jet fuel) and generator produces electricity to feed those electric motors, and batteries inside allow the aircraft to store the juice. “We can actually boost the power that the engine is able to provide for those very high-power-consumptive moments in flight, as well as provide a backup to the engine,” says Tarek Weekes, the aircraft’s chief engineer at Elroy.
Elroy Air has a video up showing off their hardware.