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Senior Bloomberg Aviation reporter Thomas Black opens his profile on Aerolane:
“A few pioneers in the West Texas desert are resurrecting an idea from the 1940s to revolutionize modern air-cargo delivery.”
The team at Aerolane was thrilled to host Black on-site at Lubbock's Reese Air Park. Excerpts from his reporting are below:
“On an abandoned Air Force field near Lubbock peppered with prairie-dog holes, the startup Aerolane is testing a business plan to pull cargo gliders with small freighter planes. The concept from former executives at Amazon.com Inc. and BNSF Railway Co. is that carriers could double capacity by towing a second engineless aircraft.
The potential savings — as much as 65% less fuel burn when the gliders are purpose-built for aerodynamics — are huge for a $135 billion air-freight industry that doesn’t blink at investing in new aircraft engines to reduce fuel use by 15% and that quickly adopted winglets to boost efficiency just 5%.”
The company is tapping into megatrends driving the economy, such as emissions reduction and catering to e-commerce customers addicted to fast delivery. Aerolane expects the savings could make air freight more competitive with trucks. Investors, including RedBlue Capital and former Boeing chief Dennis Muilenburg, kicked in $10 million in October.
Aerolane is working on FAA authorization to start operations with pre-owned aircraft that have been stripped of their engines and converted into gliders. For now, it’s been experimenting with hauling an aircraft that’s fully functional, and flying in a limited area.
“The physics are in our favor,” Graetz said. “Look at the birds. They do it. We can learn a lot from birds.”
The gliders would be constructed with modern materials to keep them light and much sturdier than the World War II design that relied on canvas pulled over wooden frames. The new aircraft essentially would be cargo containers with wings.
“That’s the beautiful thing about gliders,” Kimchi says. “It’s really, really simple.”
