An artist’s rendition of a fleet of the networked autonomous cargo planes being developed by Grid Aero.
Courtesy of Grid Aero
As the Pentagon gears up for the possibility of a war with China over Taiwan, it’s grappling with a thorny problem: how to get supplies across thousands of miles of water to U.S. forces battling an enemy with an arsenal of long-range missiles designed to destroy lumbering American cargo planes and ships.
Grid Aero believes it has a solution: split up the cargo across a fleet of cheap, small, autonomous airplanes and make it a losing proposition economically to shoot them down with $1 million to $2 million anti-aircraft missiles.
Plenty of Silicon Valley startups are trying to pitch the Department of Defense on new ways of moving troops and supplies around. Grid Aero CEO Arthur Dubois has worked at two: Xwing, which aimed to graft a robot brain onto existing airplanes to allow them to fly without a pilot, and the company that acquired it last year, Joby Aviation, which is developing an electric plane capable of taking off and landing like a helicopter. Neither approach offers the right combination of range, capacity and affordability, according to Dubois. That’s why he founded Grid Aero.
“The opportunity that we saw here is if we built the platform just for cargo, just built to really flood the battle space with many, many assets, we could drop the price significantly,” said Dubois.
Grid Aero came out of stealth Monday with a prototype aircraft, dubbed the Lifter-Lite, that it built in just six months. Intended as a pickup truck of the skies, the aircraft is designed to carry anywhere from 1,000 to 7,000 pounds for 2,000 miles, enabling resupply from the U.S. fortress on Guam to locations inside the first island chain surrounding China, which is expected to be the front lines if war breaks out.
Grid has raised $6 million in seed funding, led by Calibrate Ventures and Ubiquity Ventures. The San Leandro, Calif.-based company has also won a $1.2 million award from the Air Force to flesh out how the autonomous aircraft would interact with ground crew and air traffic control.
The Lifter-Lite prototype, which is 90% of the size of their planned final product, is roughly similar to a Cessna Caravan SkyCourier, a 51-foot-long workhorse used by FedEx to serve smaller cities. It provides a long range because it runs on conventional, dirty aviation fuel, in contrast to the many electric, hybrid and hydrogen-powered aircraft being developed by other startups. It has a simple, winged design – “tried and true” in how it will fly, said Dubois – and is made of off-the-shelf parts and an aluminum skin rather than composites to keep costs down.
The first prototype of Grid Aero’s cargo plane sits in a hangar in San Leandro, California. The nose is designed to open, allowing cargo to be loaded by forklift. There’s also a door with a ramp in the tail.
Courtesy of Grid Aero
While Xwing in 2024 successfully demonstrated an autonomous cargo-carrying Caravan in Air Force exercises, Dubois said it was clear officers saw it as a halfway solution. “It was like, oh man, this is a great platform, but I don’t know if I could buy hundreds of them. It’s not quite the range. It’s not quite the payload.”
He started to sketch out a different concept that year with three cofounders: CTO Chinmay Patel, who previously worked at Boeing’s Wisk robot air taxi unit; former Air Force test pilot Alex Kroll; and chief commercial officer Brandon Florian, who spent a decade at Northrop Grumman.
In the Pacific, the U.S. military operates from large bases in Hawaii, Guam, Japan and South Korea that are distant from the places where fighting could take place. The closest U.S. air base to Taiwan, Kadena on the southern Japanese island of Okinawa, is 370 miles from Taiwan. Guam is 2,000 miles away.
China has prepared to target those U.S. bases and stretched American supply lines by amassing an arsenal of long-range missiles. “Our adversaries know where we want to go and they have designed their threat systems to take away the very few places we want to go,” said retired Air Force Major General Lawrence Martin, a former C-130 pilot and senior commander of transport operations who is advising Grid Aero.
To adapt, the Pentagon has been developing the means to rapidly circulate forces among a large number of remote locations, aiming to make them harder to target. The Air Force has been refurbishing World War II-era bases deeper in the Pacific and practicing operating from austere airstrips. The Marines are working on deploying expeditionary units to set up missile launchers on small islands to threaten Chinese ships.
Dubois and his team of 14 have developed the Lifter-Lite to be a lifeline for those kinds of operations.
CEO Arthur Dubois
Courtesy of Grid Aero
It’s got rugged landing gear that can handle open fields or beaches, and is designed to take off in under 1,500 feet, less than a third of the length of runways at small airports. Lifter-Lite is controlled by a remote operator who can adjust the flight path and approve landing or takeoff, but Grid is designing the plane to fly completely autonomously to make it immune to jamming or the loss of communications. The company is equipping the plane with cameras to view its surroundings and recognize landmarks for orientation, as well as to avoid obstacles and other aircraft.
Dubois won’t disclose pricing yet, but he said the aim is to make it affordable for the DoD to operate many hundred Lifter-Lites. It will be a “fifth to a 10th of the cost of any other solution on a pound per mile basis,” he said.
The company aims to leverage having a large fleet in the air simultaneously in other ways than making it harder to shoot them all down. That includes sharing intel, like passing along a sighting of an enemy, allowing other aircraft to avoid it, or relaying commands to a Lifter-Lite that’s lost its connection with ground staff. “It’s a network,” said Dubois, hence the name Grid Aero. Military officials are also interested in using the planes for surveillance, he said.
Already, Lifter Lite is generating interest. “I have yet to walk into a meeting that Grid has done with our DOD partners where the response has not been, that’s a valid and excellent logistics concept,” said Martin. The questions have been on how they can deliver on the performance and price they’re promising, he added.
There are four Chinese projects to build comparable autonomous cargo planes that Grid Aero has become aware of. “It’s a case of convergent evolution where people designing around the same problem are coming up with similar solutions,” said Dubois.
Courtesy of Grid Aero
Dubois says they’re working against the penchant in the DoD to gold plate projects and ask for more capabilities to be engineered in, escalating costs. Survival is also contingent on finding funding in a defense budget that can’t cover everything that military planners would like. Other efforts to develop new logistics capabilities for the Pacific have been canceled, like a project to develop a giant seaplane dubbed the Liberty Lifter.
If ground testing goes well, the first flight of the Lifter-Lite could come before the end of the year or early in the next.
Dubois and his team are also eyeing the commercial cargo market, and have had conversations with carriers like UPS and FedEx.
But to start, he says their attention is focused squarely on the potential for war in the Pacific, and making sure U.S. forces can’t be starved of supplies. “There’s a bunch of people raising the alarm right now, and I think it’s time something is being done about this.”
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