Kite
Kite is a highly modular 25 kg autonomous eVTOL delivery drone. It is Swoop Aero’s flagship product and is currently in production, with fleets in operation across the globe.
Aircraft Specifications:
Range: 180 km
Cruise speed: 120 km/h
Top speed: 165 km/h
MTOW: 25 kg
Class: Autonomous
Kite operating in rural Australia
Project Details:
As aircraft architect, I led the planform layout, aerodynamic and propulsion design of the aircraft.
As project lead, I developed a highly successful demonstrator version of the aircraft and carried out 80% of the detailed design and fabrication, delivering the first test flights within 12 weeks of first putting pen to paper.
I was design lead for several modules and sub-assemblies of the production version of the aircraft, including the aircraft's primary wing structure, fairings, payload door mechanism, battery retention mechanism, wing retention mechanism and battery module.
Designed, analyzed and tested over 120 production parts spanning the following manufacturing methods, prepreg composites molding, injection molding, CNC machining, 3D printing, laser cutting and CNC routing.
Setup and maintained a parametric top down CAD architecture that was used throughout detailed design, including completing all the aerodynamic lofting.
Mechanical Core - Kite’s primary chassis like structure:
Kite has a very unique product feature that enables an international standard sized shipping box to pass through the center of the aircraft. This allows payload to be easily top loaded, while still supporting autonomous delivery through underside doors.
However this highly desirable product feature posed a formidable technical challenge. To maintain aircraft balance, it is essential to center the payload bay over the wing, requiring a hole through the wing right where the wing spar would normally sit, to provide the passthrough capability.
The task fell to me to make this possible without adding significant mass to the primary wing structure. To solve this challenge a number of options were explored before settling on a molded carbon fiber structure.
The resulting design was an extremely weight efficient solution that not only transferred all the wing bending loads around the payload bay, but became a central chassis that carried all the major structural loads of the aircraft including the battery, payload, booms and VTOL propulsion system.
The mechanical core also served to enable a highly modular system, with all other aircraft modules attached through quick connect interfaces.
I designed prototype molds and did the lay-up of the first prototypes in-house. These were tested using a whiffle tree wing bend test rig that I designed and built.
Making use of an extremely rapid iteration cycle, the ply stack and internal structure design was optimized, before being outsourced for cost effective manufacture of production parts.
Transitoning to fixed wing flight
Kites at the end of the production line
Highly modular design made possible by the Mechanical Core module
Mechanical Core - Kite’s chassis like primary structure
