FedEx CEO says the company is working with Reliable Robotics to pilot the use of an unmanned single-engine aircraft for cargo delivery
Dive Brief: — FedEx is working with Reliable Robotics to pilot the use of an unmanned single-engine aircraft for cargo delivery … Tweets: @supplychaindive Tweets: @supplychaindive : FedEx is testing unmanned small turboprop airplanes in very remote areas for their parcel delivery potential. https://www.supplychaindive.com/ ... https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The Reliable Robotics pilot extends an automation playbook FedEx has been building for years: it put the SameDay Bot on Memphis sidewalks in 2019 and later signed on to trial the Elroy Air Chaparral C1 autonomous drone for heavier loads. The move also answers UPS, which ran its own drone delivery tests with invested partner CyPhy Works back in 2016.
What distinguishes this pilot is the aircraft class — a retrofitted unmanned single-engine turboprop tested in remote areas — which targets route economics that sidewalk robots and small drones cannot reach, rather than the last hundred feet.
First-order effects
- FedEx gains a testbed for crewless cargo flights on thin rural routes, where scheduled pilot staffing is hardest to justify; Reliable Robotics gets a marquee carrier validation for its autonomy retrofit.
Second-order effects
- UPS faces pressure to match fixed-wing autonomy after its smaller-drone experiments, and FedEx's parallel bet on Elroy Air signals it will spread pilots across vendors rather than standardizing on one.
Third-order effects
- If retrofitted single-engine cargo aircraft prove out, regional feeder flying — the labor-intensive connective tissue between hub airports and small towns — becomes the next frontier for crewless operations, contingent on regulator acceptance.
The trend: Parcel carriers are layering autonomy across every leg of delivery — sidewalk robots, drones, now crewless feeder aircraft — with each pilot narrowing the gap between experiment and network-scale deployment.