Summary
There are very few people with the combination of ambition and skill than I’ve seen in Naman in the year since I first invested and have gotten to know him. Just twenty-one, he taught himself physics, engineering, and manufacturing on YouTube during COVID, and turned that knowledge into real, flying aircraft and a company backed by Greenoaks, Lightspeed, and Lachy Groom. I suspect he is in the early days of what will be a decades-long pursuit. He has chosen a worthy mission. There is no category that so physically reshapes the world as transportation technology. Where you live and work, what you can access, how much you pay for everything, and most importantly, who you spend time with, are all a function of the transportation technology at your disposal. In my opinion, improving the way we move will have a more positive and noticeable impact on our lives than AI will, and Naman’s aim is to move all movement to the sky. This is a Deep Dive on how he plans to do it. Airbound: As We May Move Every morning, or most, when I can, I wake up before my wife and kids, tip-toe downstairs, ease open the front door, and sit on the stoop as the sun comes up. Huberman says the morning sunlight is good for your circadian rhythm or cortisol or some shit. I’ve been doing this for a little while now, since the winter at least, but some time in the spring I noticed the birds. There’s a honey locust tree on the sidewalk in front of the stoop, framed by Eric Adams’ legacy (new garbage cans) every Monday and Thursday, and as the sun rises, a quarrel of house sparrows flits back and forth between it and their little nooks at the top of each brownstone. Since I started noticing these birds, I’ve started noticing other birds more consciously. I think, but I can’t be quite sure, that I can see their wings flapping in higher-resolution, or slower motion, or both? And I’ve been wondering why. Like are the birds a sign? Am I supposed to follow them? How can I follow them, when I can’t fly? One morning, as I approached my office in Soho thinking about this very piece you’re reading right now, a great blue heron floated regally over the roofs of the block’s cast-iron buildings, and I was like, “Oh, I get it.” Some time in the spring, I started talking to Naman Pushp about writing a deep dive on Airbound. Pretty much every week since, often more than once, we’ve hopped on a Zoom, me in Manhattan and him in Bangalore, to talk about what the world looks like when flight is the way everything and everyone moves, and what it would take to get there. One of the things that happens when flight dominates, Naman said, is that buildings flip. “You fly on to the roof and enter from there,” like a bird. Birds have long been the envy of and inspiration for earthbound humans. Leonardo da Vinci studied birds to understand flight at the turn of the 16th century. da Vinci’s Codex on the Flight of Birds (l) and early flying machine (r) Humans failed to turn those avian observations into flight for four centuries, but the Wright Brothers studied those failures. As bicycle makers, they understood that a machine didn’t have to balance itself if its rider had the right controls. They studied the birds, too. Watching birds twist their wingtips helped them develop “wing warping,” the control mechanism that helped make their 1903 flight possible. The Wrights Fly At Kitty Hawk, North Carolina (1903) “Learning the secret of flight from a bird was a good deal like learning the secret of magic from a magician,” Orville later said. “After you once know the trick and what to look for, you see things that you did not notice when you did not know exactly what to look for.” Flying progressed quickly from the Wrights to October 1958 when Pan Am flew the first Boeing 707 from New York to Paris and ushered in the Jet Age, an age that we, 68 years later, still inhabit. That we can fly through the air, across the globe, while watching movies and munching on snacks, is a technological miracle. It has shrunk the globe, made roses cut in Kenya available in Brooklyn flower shops, and allowed Naman to fundraise in New York and San Francisco without permanently leaving Bangalore. “Like seriously what in the ever-loving fuck are planes,” Naman marveled in an old blog post. “I’m an aerospace engineer and I still refuse to believe that shit is anything short of magic. Like there’s genuinely no other way to put the accomplishments of humanity other than just… sheer magic.” And yet… humans still do not flit about in the air as birds do. Planes are much too big for that, for one thing, and too expensive to operate, for another. Daily, we are roadbound, grounded to the streets by feet and wheels, stuck in traffic on streets built for cars at the expense of humans. Naman wants to change that, by sending all movement to the sky, with aircraft that borrow from birds not just in their wings, but in the shape of their whole bodies. Airbound’s first drone, the TRT To do so, Airbound must beat existing vehicles on speed, versatility, and cost. All three are required for victory. How quickly can you get somewhere? Can you go from where you are to where you want to be, when you want to go? What does it cost? “Our goal is to build vehicles that dominate1 across these axes,” Naman wrote in a recent technical memo. “If an aircraft can be more versatile than the car, faster than the train, and cheaper than the bus, then you can replace all of them. That is the universal vehicle we intend to create.” An eVTOL (electric vertical take-off and landing) naturally falls out of these requirements. It takes off and lands straight up and down like a helicopter, so it doesn’t need a runway (versatile), it flies over traffic in a straight line (fast), and it runs on electric motors, which are cheaper to power and maintain than engines (cheap). Every delivery drone you’ve seen is an eVTOL, as are the air taxis Joby and Archer are building. Others are making eVTOLs, too, so while they will all be fast and versatile, Airbound must beat them on cost. Joby eVTOL That seems crazy, when the competition has so much scale. Amazon - Amazon! - the company that is the best in the Western Hemisphere at moving goods to people - Amazon is making eVTOL delivery drones. Last week, The New York Times wrote a story on Amazon Prime Air’s nascent operations in Richardson, Texas: It’s Raining Boxes: Amazon Drones Overwhelm a Texas Suburb. Describing the logistics king’s flying machine, Juliet Macur wrote, “Within a minute or so, an 83-pound drone with six blue arms and whirring propellers appeared in a corner of the sky before zipping over nearby houses, looking like a cross between a mechanical dragonfly and an X-wing fighter, and buzzing like a battalion of bees. The drone’s mission: delivering an Amazon package. The single cardboard box of cargo held a maximum of five pounds…” Six arms and 83 pounds to carry a maximum of five. Before I met Naman, I would have read that and thought, “Woah, the sci-fi future has arrived,” but after meeting him and hearing what he’s building and why, those numbers sound absurd. To be fair, Amazon’s 83 pounds is fully-loaded, so it’s really 78 plus the five pound payload, for a payload-to-empty-weight ratio of 0.06x. Zipline has a much stronger ratio; its P2 weighs 55 pounds and can carry eight, good for 0.15x. Airbound’s is in a different league. Its first drone, the TRT, is so light (1.5kg) that Naman could hold it with three fingers, and carries 1kg, for a payload-to-empty-weight ratio of 0.67x. Naman Carrying the TRT with Three Fingers Its new V2 drone can carry five kilograms (11 pounds). Its payload-to-empty-weight ratio is 1.67x. It can carry more than it weighs. It is not that Amazon doesn’t have resources or smart engineers. It’s just that Naman is obsessed with building aircraft that carry the most payload with the least weight, because he believes that combination is what will allow Airbound to offer the cheapest deliveries possible (fast and versatile, too), which is what he believes it will take to win. “We believe that if we can truly solve for cost,” Naman wrote, “flight can dominate all existing transportation for 80% of all cargo and 90% of all human movement.” If they can – and that is certainly not guaranteed – then not only will they move movement to the sky, they will force the earth to shape itself around this new mode of movement. As Naman wrote in Airbound’s Manifesto, this world is “A world where goods move as freely as information does today; a world where flying is cheaper than taking the bus; a world without compromise.” Naman’s Vision I first heard of Naman when my plane landed in Mexico City for an event last October. When my international service switched on, I saw an email from Lachy Groom, who had invested in Airbound and called Naman “One of the most exciting founders I’ve backed recently.” Naman was going to be in NYC the next week, “Want to meet (I highly encourage)?” I wasn’t particularly interested in a drone delivery company, to be honest. It was a competitive space in which it felt like Zipline had an insurmountable lead and the culture to keep it. Amazon and Google waited in the wings anyway. Regulation is tough. And Naman didn’t seem to have a PhD in aerospace engineering, or a college degree, for that matter. But I respect Lachy’s judgment, Airbound’s monthly flights were going vertical, and I was intrigued by Naman’s simple explanation - “we’re building the most efficient way to transport atoms” - and ambition - “we can make 1 cent deliveries possible and enable a world where you see trillions of deliveries annually,” so I said I’d love to. When I met Naman, at Felix Roasting back in Soho, 8,306 miles from Bangalore as the crow flies, he looked young, because he was, just 21 years old, which made it even more embarrassing when he opened his mouth and proved himself to be about 8,306x smarter than me. In that first conversation, he showed the grasp of the spectrum from 30,000 foot vision to sub-millimeter details that great Vertical Integrator founders seem to possess, and which, I’d come to appreciate, are necessary to hold in one brain when you want to solve a tightly coupled optimization problem like building the “perfect aircraft.” By the end, he’d convinced me it might be possible to make flight the cheapest mode of movement, inevitable even, that whoever did it would build an enormous business, and that he might just be that whoever. I invested in Airbound’s 100 and three weeks to move a ton of grain from the midwest, where it was grown, to New York City, where it was consumed or shipped overseas. After, it cost 10 billion agreement, and for another reason, the deal explodes in 18 hours. The artisan sets down her brush at 11:00 AM Tuesday, Tokyo time. It is 10:00 PM Monday in New York. You have until 4:00 PM Tuesday. Obviously, price is no issue. What do you do? The courier takes a car fifty minutes to Haneda, where he boards a Bombardier Global 7500 and flies for eleven hours and forty-five minutes over the Bering Sea before landing at JFK. Teterboro has a 100,000 pound weight limit, and while the plane would come in under after burning its fuel, the Port Authority needs a weight certification seventy-two hours in advance and you don’t have seventy-two hours, so JFK it is. The courier walks the case, still strapped to his wrist, through customs, which takes twenty-five minutes, and boards a helicopter bound for the city. A few minutes later, he and the chopper land at the 34th Street Heliport. He takes a car from the Heliport to the office on Park Avenue, gets out, enters, checks in with security, takes the elevator up to the thirty-seventh floor, and is escorted into a conference room, where he unlocks the case, hands over the pen, and watches the contract get signed at 1:30 PM New York time, with two and a half hours to spare. The whole trip costs around 1,000/kg-km. You can get something anywhere you want pretty fast as long as you are willing to pay. This is, of course, a ridiculous example, meant to show that the cost to move things exists on a spectrum. You can move something fast if you send it by itself, with its own chaperone and its own vehicles. If you want to pay less, you need to send it with other items. You could send the pen from Japan in the mail for ~850, it cost something like a year-and-a-half of an average American’s 260 price tag cost only 20% of an average American’s much higher 4-5 million to purchase today. Even at these initial prices, things like delivery and air taxi service make sense. Not having to pay a human chaperone is huge, as is flying right over traffic, as are electric motors. Plus, the electric stack allows for high utilization and requires low maintenance, which lets those who build on it amortize CapEx over so many flights. There are many companies working to take advantage of the novel things the eVTOL stack enables. There is no one else, Naman believes, who understands how close we are to replacing cars with personal aircraft. “The two things that make Airbound different,” he explained to me on a recent call, “are, one: I don’t think that anyone else notices that the eVTOL stack is like 90% of the way to replacing cars. They don’t need runways, they can operate autonomously, they’re electric, they can be small. Cost is the last 10%, and it is the most… if you get cost right, everything else will solve itself and you will reshape all movement. If you don’t get cost right, this will just be Aviation++.” The pieces are there, in his view, “for an aerial vehicle that anyone can own in the same way that the first car [the Benz] brought together the pieces for a car that anyone could own.” The Benz and its successors elsewhere on the same efficient frontier were 90% of the way to replacing horses and carriages. Ford’s focus on cost took the industry the final 10%, and now horses and carriages are the analogy everyone uses to describe something that was completely obsoleted by a new technology. A flying car that anyone can own sounds as preposterous today as a car that anyone could own did at the turn of the 20th century, but history suggests that we’re on the right track, and that it will come down to cost. So how do you carry aircraft that final 10%? That’s the second thing that makes Airbound different. “To get cost right, we realized that carbon fiber is the thing. That we can do so much better with carbon fiber,” Naman gushed. Naman fucking loves carbon fiber. Naman Learns to Make Drones He’s loved carbon fiber for his entire adult life, and then some. Naman grew up across Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Malaysia, where he got his first exposure to robotics via LEGO. By age 13, he started making things with aluminum and steel. He was entranced by his burgeoning ability to turn an idea into a real, physical thing. Then COVID hit when Naman was fifteen, keeping him stuck inside and feeling bored, like a lot of kids. Unlike a lot of kids, he took advantage of all of the free time. The most successful ones right now were the ones that during COVID were learning and were on YouTube sucking information about anything and learning about everything in life. So when they go and build companies, they find that first they’re naive, so they think anything is possible. That’s Naman. First, he joined Helpful Engineering, a Slack community of thousands of engineers, technologists, scientists, and doctors worldwide, organized into roughly 40 sub-groups each tackling a different piece of the COVID response in an open-source, share-everything fashion. The main focus of his original group, the Open-PAPR Design team, was respirators, but spending time with grownup makers from around the world gave him the confidence that he could build useful stuff, too. Like drones. Naman started Opendrone, which would grow into Airbound, as a Helpful Engineering group, formed to create an open-source 3D-printable delivery drone that makers anywhere could build to deliver essential supplies to those in need. To get the drones delivering medicines ASAP, they’d need to work without expensive supporting infrastructure. The one problem was that Naman, well, he’d built robots but he’d never built drones. No matter. He had all of the world’s knowledge at his fingertips via YouTube, and he gulped it down at 3x speed. He taught himself physics and engineering and aerodynamics and CAD and whatever else he’d need to win the one-week Hackaday hackathon. The beauty of an open source hackathon is that we can go back and see Naman’s learning in real-time. Evolution of the Opendrone Design In the first design log, which Naman wrote, he and the team had designed their first aircraft, the hexacopter. By the second log, Naman and team had evolved the design, “marking the switch from what people imagine a ‘drone’ to look like, to one more in line with the requirements of a long-range delivery drone.” “We settled on a tail-sitter,” he wrote, “where the drone would sit vertically, take off, and pitch 90 degrees to transition into fixed wing flight.” The third iteration, the Blended Wing V2, is the first that looks like what Airbound would eventually build. While the complete redesign “retained many of the characteristics” of the first blended wing model, it featured a “larger middle section, which allows for enough space to store the electronics and the cargo,” based on a 2004 paper from Boeing on blended wing body aircraft. Note that at this stage (the third image above), it looks very metallic. The biggest note in the fifth and final log, then, from the perspective of Airbound, was one on how they planned to make it and from what: “we had initially begun with a plan to 3D print the drone, then moving on to sheet metal fabrication and finally settling on a composite wet layup process for the body.” While the composite wasn’t yet carbon fiber, he was on the path. Naman’s design was good enough to win the hackathon, grand prize: 500. “I had to be insanely scrappy,” he told Rahul Sanghi for the awesome Tigerfeathers piece. “I didn’t know anything about aerodynamic principles then. I was just playing around with a bunch of random airfoil designs and seeing what came together. It was more of a 3D modelling exercise than an aerodynamic challenge. Things became trickier because I couldn’t afford an actual 3D printer. So I printed out the stencils of each part using a regular A4 paper printer, and then used a hot-wire cutter to carve the actual parts out of industrial foam. Then I basically stuck them together with toothpicks and tape and some adhesive. I added some polyester putty to fill in any gaps, and then sanded down till I got a smooth shape.” Via Tigerfeathers That first prototype that Naman painstakingly built, made using fiberglass as the composite, actually flew, and that was good enough to get a 25k from India’s gradCapital (Naman’s early experiment graces its homepage, and gradCapital founder Abhishek Sethi needed to get on a call with Naman’s dad to convince him to let his son take the money). The 1517 grant gave him the money to buy a 3D printer for the foam molds, and the grad windfall allowed him to move into his own apartment / unofficial lab, where he reworked the design from scratch based on everything he learned and upgraded to carbon fiber and kevlar sheets in place of fiberglass. During that same year, his 12th grade year, he got 700, if ten thousand of them could be built. The Bureau’s director at the time was Eugene Vidal, Gore Vidal’s dad. One economist who later dug into the history suggests Wright was inspired by both the mass production of cars and the dream of the family airplane. What Wright found was that each time the cumulative number of airplanes built doubled, the labor needed to build each one fell by a steady percentage, about 20% on average across American aircraft makers. We call it Wright’s Law now. The curve behind cheap solar panels, cheap batteries, and cheap chips, and hopefully cheap nuclear reactors, one of the most oft-cited ideas in not boring, began as a study of how to make airplanes cheap. Chart from Original Wright’s Law Paper Wright discovered his Law in pursuit of a cheap little airplane. It went on to make almost everything cheap except little airplanes. Neither the 5,000 to make in India, and would cost an additional 100k when they were at Airbound’s current production scale, and have come down to the mid-to-high tens of thousands as production ramps. The human-carrying eVTOLs we talked about earlier are obviously much more expensive, at over 5 million to buy. For V2’s price and weight, it is also a very performant aircraft. Naman’s rule of thumb for a conventional aircraft is “30% structures, 30% fuel, 30% payload.” A fully loaded V2 is more than 60% payload at takeoff, and Naman thinks Airbound can get its structure down to 4-5% of the aircraft’s total weight. It’s easier to manufacture, too. V2 has a wingspan nearly double that of the TRT, and it should take half as long to build. How? “We just simplified shit a lot,” Naman said. “The running joke is that the V1 was designed by someone who didn’t know manufacturing and the V2 was designed by someone who knows manufacturing. They were both designed by me.” The Small doesn’t need to beat a fully loaded semi to generate a lot of demand, although there are some uses the Small can steal from a truck immediately: things that people want immediately. Because it doesn’t need to wait for a batch and because it flies over traffic and buildings as the crow does, the Small can start eating same-day delivery use cases on items up to 5kg. The Small, Naman says, “is meant to be the aircraft that can compete with vans in last-mile.” The Small mainly needs to beat the cost of a person on a scooter, in a car, or around a van route hand-delivering you something that weighs a few kilograms. In the US, DoorDash advertises base pay of 5 to have a full dinner delivered, but you probably wouldn’t pay 167 billion. This is probably high in some ways and low in others. For example, it doesn’t include the cost of the delivery vehicles themselves. Because Airbound is starting small in an enormous market, and because it’s not flying humans, it’s able to fly a lot. Airbound has made more than 13,000 autonomous flights across Bengaluru and Guntur. When I talked to Naman earlier this month, he had two V2s and twenty-six TRTs in the air at the same time. Each flight gives Airbound data with which it can both improve its aircraft and operations, begin making the case to regulators that Airbound aircraft are safe, and work towards larger platforms. Medium All of that flight data will be particularly useful for the Medium aircraft, which will start by flying packages but is intended to ultimately fly humans. Naman himself admits the Medium can’t be just a scaled-up Small. It has different aerodynamics and a different structural fraction, because it’s a different aircraft with a different airframe. What he hopes to transfer and scale is everything around the airframe: The carbon-fiber-first design method and the one-piece manufacturing process The experience making lots and lots of aircraft The controls work and design principles that make V2 “unreasonably stable” The autonomy stack and the operations playbook The supply chain and regulatory relationships The flight hours Turns out, that’s actually the kind of stuff that Wright was tracking (the Wright stuff), too. He tracked how many hours of labor it took to build the next plane, which improved based on everything the manufacturer learned. That’s why Wright’s Law describes the “Learning Curve.” In Airbound’s case, the learning from the Small will be brought to bear on the Medium. The Medium is the aircraft Naman is most looking forward to building, because he can make it much more efficient than the Small. “It is like, you just cannot make a five kg as efficient as you can make a 100 kg aircraft,” Naman said. “It’s not physically possible.” You can understand why by watching the birds. Small wings moving slowly live in what aerodynamicists call the low Reynolds number regime. There, the air’s stickiness matters much more relative to the wing’s size, so a small wing pays more drag for every bit of lift. It’s why the sparrows flap like crazy and the heron floats. Naman says his most efficient designs are north of 100 kg. Bigger aircraft can be proportionally lighter, too. At 100 kg, he thinks structure can get to about 4% of the aircraft’s weight or lower, without needing carbon cloth any thinner than what already exists. The Medium also fixes the Small’s people problem. While Airbound’s aircraft are cheap to manufacture and getting cheaper, flying one is “still double the cost of what it should be because of labor,” he told me. Specifically, while there are no pilots in the aircraft, people are still required to supervise the fleet from a control room, remotely. As Airbound proves its vehicles are safe, and as regulations change to support drone delivery, the same person will be allowed to monitor more drones. Today, in India, there’s no regulatory limit on how many drones one person can monitor. In the US, it varies from operator to operator, but no one has gone higher than about 10. For now, one person watches every five Airbound aircraft fly. No matter how low that ratio goes, as long as it’s above zero, an aircraft with 20x the payload will pay for 20x less labor per kg. At that scale, Naman expects electricity and battery replacement to account for most of the cost, with battery replacement the largest item. Longer-lasting batteries and more efficient aircraft would then become the main ways to drive costs lower. “What we are saying,” Naman said, “is that we can make it so that energy starts to dominate at 100 kgs.” That will be an incredibly important milestone. When energy dominates, you’re left with physics and nothing left to squeeze but the aircraft itself. And squeezing the aircraft is what Airbound does. Over time, the goal is to get cheaper (cost) than most vehicles carrying 20 tons on a kg-km or tonne-km basis, even though Airbound aircraft will carry only kilograms at a time, in the air, meaning it will win on speed and versatility, too. Note: the Small’s 54¢ figure uses an illustrative 2.34 per mile. Spread that over a full 20-tonne load and convert to kilometers, and it costs roughly seven cents to move one tonne one kilometer. Carry a half-load – ten tonnes – at the same vehicle cost, and it’s about fifteen cents. Naman’s target for the Medium is four to six cents per tonne-kilometer. That’s cheaper than a fully loaded semi, and Naman expects it will also be less than half the cost of a bus or train. That is what it takes to give everyone access to flight. Carrying a full 100 kilograms, it works out to about half a cent per kilometer. And those are straight-line kilometers, which Naman counts as worth about two on the road, so the real gap is wider than the per-kilometer numbers suggest. It’s a target, and there is much work to be done to get there. But getting better than, or close to, full-20-ton-truck economics at 100kg would be a major unlock. A business could receive a truckload’s worth of goods over the course of a day without receiving a truckload all at once, and send each order out as soon as it is ordered. At some point, they will restructure their operations towards point-to-point from fulfillment centers further from a city’s economic core. Despite the fact that most cargo volume moves on ships, trucking accounts for half of the global logistics market by spend. Market size estimates vary, but it’s somewhere between 4-6 trillion. Whatever the true size, it is a very large prize, and one that is largely determined by price. “2027 is the year I will start pitching ‘Replace all of your trucks with my drones. Not some of them, all of them,’” he said. But cargo shouldn’t have all the fun. People want to move themselves faster, cheaper, too. The Medium will be the first Airbound aircraft designed to do that. The sequencing is intentional. Getting regulatory approval to fly humans is much harder than getting approval to move packages. Airbound can use less precious cargo to learn how to make the Medium better, cheaper, and safer, and use the data from its flights to prove that it is indeed safer. “Before moving a single human,” he said, “let me just come to you [the regulator] with like 10 million hours of flight data on… an aircraft that is technically capable of carrying humans,” carrying “payloads that weigh about the same as a human.” It’s sort of like Wright’s Law applied to safety: learn by doing, and get better and better the more you do, so that by the time you fly humans, you know it’s safe. An aircraft that carries humans will need to be safe and comfortable for humans, too. It will probably need windows, for one thing, and a seat, for another. Adding windows to the single carbon fiber structure will introduce engineering challenges, and the seat will introduce weight. An early sketch Naman showed me didn’t look very comfortable, but it’s not physically impossible to carry humans safely and comfortably, and there will be plenty of room in the cost to work with. Already, in just a couple months, the latest design has the ceiling height of a sports car, and is roomier in every other dimension. He is learning. The goal, at the start, is to make the Medium cost competitive with a car. On launch, he expects it to cost around 35-40,000 to buy as a starting point, with costdowns from Wright’s Law from there. He doesn’t expect it will replace the family car, but he does think that it might replace the second car. “That one is normally just for getting one person to work anyway,” he said. To really eat into the market for moving people though, Airbound will need to let them move together. Large Naman plans to introduce a 500 kg aircraft as well. He didn’t want to at first, because five 100kg craft can do what one 500 kg craft can, but he realized that people have families, and families like to travel together. Here, the cost to beat is the family car. AAA’s 2026 analysis puts the average cost of owning and operating a new car at about 86 cents per mile, assuming 15,000 miles a year over five years. Fuel, maintenance, repairs, and tires account for about 29 of the 86 cents, so even if you already own the car and count only fuel, maintenance, repairs, and tires, that’s 29 cents a mile. A Medium, which carries just one person, would be much cheaper, at Naman’s under 2¢ per mile target. A Large with a full family in it, at Naman’s target costs, would be about 3¢ per mile. Both would be comfortably cheaper than the family car, not to mention faster and cooler. How big is that market for moving people? Here, the math is a little trickier, because the ride-hailing, public transport, and airline markets are surprisingly small (combined ~2.5-3T of new cars are sold, not accounting for used cars (another 4-5 million passenger eVTOL to something like a car’s price takes more like 100x. At Wright’s 20% per doubling, 100x takes about twenty doublings of cumulative production, roughly a million times more aircraft than you initially built. And at 5 million vehicle down the cost curve, it’s much easier to push a sub-10 million to develop a particular component. If you can only recover that investment over a thousand units, development alone contributes 10 to each. For cars, this kind of math is standard, but Naman argues that airplanes are made in such low volumes that their components are far more expensive than they need to be. Take avionics, for instance. “An aspect that a lot of people miss,” Naman told me, “is that the reason why you have avionics that should cost tens of dollars to make, being sold for tens of thousands of dollars in aviation, is because this industry is just pathetically small. It is insane how small the scale of this industry is. Which means that you have these highly bespoke supplies. There is nothing expensive about making aviation-grade hardware. And honestly, the R&D required to get to that hardware is also not that expensive. Because it is low volume, the cost ends up being obscenely high. What should actually happen is if you get to automotive scale, aviation-grade hardware should maybe be 20% more expensive than automotive to compensate for the higher cost. The other part where this cost comes down is because if we can get to reasonable scales, we can expect industrial-grade costs for our internal components. We can start to expect to use more standard components for these aircraft.” Would they just make the parts themselves then? Naman’s answer is another reason it makes sense to start by moving things before moving people. “The nice thing is that off-the-shelf hardware, the cheap off-the-shelf hardware works for cargo movement,” he said, before departing on another riff. “Cargo movement is just less sensitive. This is generally acceptable for drone systems. Sure, maybe instead of like one small flight computer, I need 3. But I mean, even at small scale buying that’s what, less than 600 in flight controllers? And with scale, that number goes down massively. So that is what makes avionics really cheap. And as we get into passenger movement, we will need much better flight controllers. But there, what I would want to do is I would want to start by making these flight computers ourselves, creating this template, and then rather than going to aviation suppliers and saying, ‘hey, make this for me at scale,’ I would rather go to automotive suppliers and say, ‘look, you already have scale. Make this better component for me.’ This is in fact the same thing that we’re dealing with with drone components because the drone industry we believe just doesn’t have that quality and have that sense of scale. And the reason why we will be attractive for an automotive supplier is because we will give automotive volumes. And at the end of the day, this creates bigger companies. Like our idea is that we don’t want to create suppliers like the suppliers Boeing has. We want to create suppliers like Foxconn. And guess what? Foxconn is bigger than Boeing by revenue. It’s crazy how huge you can get with just low margin, high volume. And that’s what we really want to turn aviation into.” So is that what Airbound wants to become, a Flying Foxconn? Not exactly, because he wants to sell the product itself, and because despite its revenue, Foxconn is smaller than Boeing by market cap. Airbound wants its suppliers to become Foxconn. “To some extent,” he told me, “we have to play the role of supplier for most things to kickstart this, but eventually, we want to vertically integrate into the things that matter most, and have suppliers build out the rest at scale.” He thinks Airbound can become the world’s largest carbon fiber fabric consumer, for example, which would provide enough incentive for someone else to get really good at it. Airbound’s advantage today is in turning carbon fiber into an aircraft: figuring out which structures carbon fiber allows them to make, how to make them, and how better manufacturing processes might change what the aircraft can do. As we’ve discussed, those things develop together. At much higher volumes, it would be worth it to a supplier to spend the CapEx to solve those problems with equipment and automation. Nothing, I would imagine, motivates you to automate like the healthy percentage of his life that Naman has spent wrestling carbon fiber sheets by hand. Every small reduction in scrap becomes valuable when you have enough scrap, just as John D. Rockefeller found it worthwhile to use 39 instead of 40 drops of solder to seal each five-gallon can of kerosene. Every production improvement that saves ten minutes per aircraft saves almost nineteen years of continuous labor across a million aircraft. These little things compound. Naman thinks the effect can eventually reach further upstream, into making the carbon fiber itself, not just turning it into sheets. “We will actually make carbon fiber cheaper,” he told me. “We will bring carbon fiber down to a point where it becomes a similar cost to steel.” Ideally, at enough scale, and with enough proven demand, Airbound will incentivize other suppliers to invest in getting really good at making carbon fiber, so they can focus their capital and attention on new problems. This is how Naman thinks about batteries. In July, Naman told me that if Airbound captured the amount of movement he had in mind, it could become “the single largest consumer of lithium ion cells in the world,” they might even buy, he predicted, twice as many lithium ion cells as everyone else combined. There is a bit of bravado in this answer, a sense that Naman is already living in the future that he can see, but the importance of batteries is a clear and present challenge today, and he’s already thinking about what it would look like to not have to use traditional lithium ion cells. “Our cost numbers,” Naman explained, “are incredibly sensitive to our battery replacement cost, which means if batteries become cheaper, the cost comes down dramatically. But more importantly, if batteries become longer-lasting, the cost moves down dramatically. Think about solid state batteries. If they can work, they’re projected to have, I think, 10-100x the life of lithium ion, so that will be fun when we can adopt them.” Fun. IF they can work is a big caveat, because the big challenges to commercialization today are precisely the longevity issues, like cracking, loss of contact, and dendrites. What he means is that, theoretically, they should be able to last longer, and the way he sees it, getting from theoretical to practical simply means solving a bunch of engineering challenges. Plus, they’d be more energy-dense, which means weight savings, which as you now know, compound too. They’ll be more expensive per kilowatt-hour for a while, but sometime before they become directly cheaper, they’ll make more sense as part of the system. In the meantime, Airbound is looking at other novel battery system solutions. “We’re also looking at some interesting problem statements on how do we integrate batteries into our structures, and I also think there’s a lot of ways to push past what exists here,” he said. “In fact, the structural battery thing is really cool because there are some nice, cute applications we can use it for right now. Like one interesting example is the payload basket we have right now. If we want to deliver to customers’ homes, we should have lights on it and the ability for the bottom to be kind of like a trapdoor that opens and closes to release the payload. You don’t want the drone to be waiting for the person to pick it up, then you run into a lot of issues, and the drone can’t fly without the payload box, because it’s part of the structure. So the problem is that if I want to put a battery in the payload box, that makes things really heavy. And if I want to deliver power through the wires, that gets really clunky. But if the payload box structure itself can be a battery, it’s a really tiny battery that serves all these purposes.” “So we’re speaking to a research team that has worked on this,” he continued. “We want to see how far along the technology is and if we can push the boundary on that. Because, again, a lot of this stuff is making me realize that our entire goal is how do we make aviation, like, an order of magnitude more affordable? And so being able to figure out batteries is going to be a very core part of that.” Structural batteries and solid-state batteries are research projects. They might not make commercial sense for a decade. That’s fine. Naman has decades. I’m not sure how, in the long run, you compete with someone who’s willing and able to obsess over those details for such a long time period. Anyway, becoming the largest battery buyer in the world would require quite a lot of volume, given that the IEA estimates that electric vehicles alone deployed 1.2 terawatt-hours of batteries in 2025. Airbound would be entering a supply chain already serving an enormous and growing market. (He thinks it won’t be large and growing for long. “If you believe in Airbound, you should short Tesla. There’s not much point to a self-driving car when you can have a self-flying car,” he told me once, half kidding I think.) But the strategic logic is straightforward. A large, dependable buyer can negotiate supply agreements, support dedicated production capacity, and give a manufacturer a reason to develop cells around its requirements. For Airbound, those requirements would include weight, power, charging performance, and its real-world cycle life. Long before becoming the world’s battery buyer, it could command enough purchasing heft to accelerate those characteristics. All of which should make the aircraft cheaper to manufacture and operate, cheap enough to manufacture and operate that people can own and rent them out like Robotaxis. “Private ownership is not going to disappear,” Naman conceded. “Even if there’s an incredibly compelling air taxi, people are still going to own cars. For this to replace the car, it has to be consumed like the car. The best analogy I can think of is Tesla’s FSD, where you still own the car, but you can also lease it out as a Robotaxi when you’re not using it. You make some money from it, and Tesla takes a cut from each trip your car does. I envision a similar end state for us in the next one to two decades.” “The next one to two decades.” All of the specific things discussed in this section – avionics, carbon fiber, batteries, whatever – those will change. Airbound will solve problems, which will create new problems and new opportunities; they’ll take advantage of the latter and solve the former, over and over. Above and beyond the specifics, the great advantage Airbound can achieve is to make small improvements, at increasing scale, over a very long time. This business model vision also speaks to the power of vertically integrating from the carbon to the customer. Imagine flying to work, getting out, and making your aircraft available until you need it again that evening. In the off chance that you need to leave in a hurry, there are plenty for rent nearby. Someone else could fly yours without buying one, and you can offset your cost of ownership. Airbound earns money when it sells the aircraft and can earn a fee when the aircraft works on the network. Owners can supply some of the capital needed to expand the fleet, so Airbound can spend more of its own capital on R&D. This also, theoretically, increases demand, giving more people more ways to afford and use Airbound’s aircraft, which… you get it. The other thing that model does, though, is to give Airbound a second core moat, beyond Scale Economies. The Movement Monopoly Airbound, if it works, seems to be the rare business that’s capable of developing both Scale Economies and Network Effects, with the manufacturing know-how potentially adding Process Power as well. (I could make an argument for the other four of Hamilton Helmer’s 7 Powers, too, but I’ll leave that to the reader.) When I brought that idea up to Naman, he’d been thinking along the same lines. We had covered Scale Economies many times, and have done so above. It is Airbound’s raison d’etre. But what about Network Effects? That depends on whether more people using the network make it better for others, in a way beyond just creating more scale to lower costs, the way that X is more valuable the more of my friends shitpost on there. I think there is a case to be made. More available aircraft in an area can mean shorter waits. Better availability attracts more customers. More customers create more paid work for aircraft owners, making it more attractive to put an aircraft on the network. More aircraft improve availability again. It’s a similar argument to the one Uber makes. Back when I was launching Breather in New York in 2013, I asked Uber NYC GM Josh Mohrer for advice, and he said their whole game was about making sure there was always a car nearby to minimize wait times. The whole flywheel spun from there, and later, the theory went, benefited from adding Uber Eats to throw more demand into the system. Airbound’s proposed network could serve goods and people using vehicles designed around the same manufacturing system, the dream of Uber Eats. Within cargo operations, an aircraft delivering for a hospital could find its next job with a retailer or a restaurant. Where the aircraft’s configuration and approvals permit it, passenger and cargo demand might also help fill different parts of the day. The valuable thing is always finding another useful job nearby, instead of spending time idle or flying empty. The more kg-km, the lower the cost per kg-km. Network effects in the physical world are local and have to be earned market-by-market, but Airbound’s advantage over an Uber is that “local” covers a larger circle. That gives Airbound two ways to make a trip more affordable – reduce the cost of supplying the aircraft, and increase the useful work the aircraft performs – which interact with each other. Cheaper aircraft make it easier to add supply to the network. A productive network makes an aircraft more attractive to own. More owners create more demand for aircraft, which supports further manufacturing investment. A larger customer base gives those aircraft more work to do. Etc. What would a business whose Network Effects feed its Scale Economies, and vice versa, look like? Naman had been thinking about that, too. He had been looking at the largest companies in the world and thinking about the combination of “having a deep moat and having great distribution.” His manufacturing analogy was “a Boeing moat multiplied by a TSMC moat,” while the customer relationship would have “the same distribution as Uber and DoorDash.” The kid is not short on ambition. The Boeing part is the difficulty of designing, manufacturing, and earning approval to operate safe aircraft. The TSMC part is the cumulative manufacturing capability, investment, and volume required to make them competitively. The Uber part is being the service people open whenever they want to move themselves or something. None is a perfect analogy - you may be squabbling with each, right now, as you read them - but together they describe the business Naman wants to build, hard engineering and scale underpinning a service affordable enough for people to use routinely. If he pulls it off, it could make competing with Airbound difficult in a bunch of ways. A new manufacturer could design a good aircraft – a better aircraft, even! – and still struggle to match the price of components bought in much larger quantities, the production yields of an experienced factory, or the cost of maintaining a standardized fleet. Before Airbound gets to scale, of course, this is an advantage that goes against the company to the benefit of its larger competitors. Its customers might also prefer an aircraft that can earn money on an established network. A new network could offer attractive software, like Uber and DoorDash do, and still need aircraft that are economical to operate. If Airbound’s aircraft have a substantial cost advantage, the challenger would need access to those aircraft or an alternative that matches their economics. A company trying to build both would have to win enough customers to support its manufacturing investment while supplying enough aircraft to make its network useful. Airbound’s ambition is to have the two sides already supporting each other by then. This is why, despite the great demands of manufacturing, owning the network is also important to Naman. When I asked in July whether he planned to sell vehicles or manage them, he was still considering leasing models, but was clear about the strategic priority: “creating that network and owning that network is just so powerful.” When we’ve talked more recently, the ownership model had evolved to include customers buying aircraft and renting them out. His consistent ambition has been to retain the relationship with the end user and the jobs to be done. None of this automatically creates a monopoly. Suppliers can sell improved components to competitors, customers can use multiple services, and a rival with substantially better economics could still win. And the competition is moving. Uber invested in Zipline and signed a deal that will absorb all of Zipline’s currently planned production, aiming for a million drone deliveries a day by 2029. DoorDash, an Airbound investor, is building its own drones. The two biggest delivery apps have each already placed bets. But if Airbound achieves the costs Naman is targeting, and uses those lower costs to build a more productive network, a competitor would have to overcome much more than Naman’s best aircraft design. The business Airbound would create in that scenario would be truly massive. Uber handled 13.6 billion rides and delivery orders in 2025, roughly 37 million a day, generating 193 billion in gross bookings and 365 billion in annual revenue; at ten percent net earnings, it would produce 1.1 trillion business. That isn’t a forecast and it is admittedly insane. It would require the network to process about twenty-seven times Uber’s 2025 daily trip volume, and the economics will depend heavily on the mix of small deliveries, cargo, and passenger journeys. A ten trillion dollar outcome would require another order of magnitude of earnings. But it’s a quick back of the envelope calculation that shows what Naman is talking about when he says that he believes Airbound could become a 10 trillion company is getting the tech right, and if the potential is that high, we should just focus on the tech until we get to $10 billion.” I asked him, once, about a comment that he made on that Lightspeed podcast, to the effect of, we’re not really focusing on exactly how the handoff (the delivery getting from the drone into the customer’s hands) would work, that (and this is me paraphrasing) “we just need to make the aircraft and we’ll figure that shit out later.” He didn’t deny it. He said that “We have some more clarity on handoffs, but still not complete clarity. Like I don’t think the best solutions will be built out by us.” On an earlier call, I’d asked about regulation, and while Airbound is engaged with regulators and acknowledges that existing regulations, in India and elsewhere, will be a bottleneck to growth, he agreed with my assessment of his position which is, basically, if you get the economics right, everything else follows. In the case of regulation, he thinks there are actually two separate jobs: making a safe aircraft and proving to regulators that the aircraft is safe, and that the latter is much harder than the former, so if you can make an aircraft cheap enough that there’s lots of demand to use it for logistics, you can walk into a regulator’s office with reams of data showing how safe it is. All of this, in a way, is systems engineering, too. It is also the textbook definition of strategy. Airbound has only so many resources at its disposal, and it needs to choose where to focus them. Whether it’s good strategy depends on whether he’s identified the right bottleneck against which to focus. Naman’s bet – and it is a bet, however steeped in historical comparisons and models it is – is that if Airbound can win on cost, speed, and versatility, the world will bend around the company. Flying things should beat grounded ones on speed and versatility, so the bet is really if he can beat other flying things, and then bikes, scooters, cars, vans, trucks, and trains on cost, he wins. That may be the wrong bet. Naman believes that while the aircraft themselves will not be commodities, movement will become one, and in commodities, lowest cost wins. But what if it is a land grab? What if the broader movement industry’s bottleneck is simply the capability to fly, and the scarce asset is deep partnerships with companies, like the ones Zipline has signed with Uber and Walmart, with enough demand to pull you down the learning curve, until you’re cheap enough? There is credible pushback on this bet, too. I mentioned this strategy to a founder friend, and he wondered whether switching costs away from drone delivery companies would prevent cost from mattering as much as Naman believes. In high switching cost businesses, he explained, cost matters less than cost + credibility with existing customers. Plus, customers pay the delivery fees anyway; would DoorDash or Uber really switch their operations just to save their customers a buck or two? I texted Naman to ask about this, and he pushed right back in a rapid succession of texts. “I think the point that customer eats delivery fee anyway is incredibly untrue,” he texted. “Delivery fee is one of the biggest concerns for all of these last mile players. Low cost is Uber’s entire land grab strategy. Uber uses low cost to capture market share and eventually ends up in a scaled steady state where their unit economics are better than anyone else’s. If you can have structurally 10x better unit ecs than Uber it’s actually pretty easy to beat them. These companies are 90% cost games, it’s just that when nothing other than scale affects unit economics, then the other layers start to matter more. This is why Uber is so obsessed with autonomous cars. There are so many misconceptions on how these industries work.” That is Naman’s answer, at least. He will need to prove it in the market, gram by gram and cent by cent. It is too early to know whether Airbound can win enough demand to reach these costs. Zipline is an amazing company run by very talented people doing real business today, and more every day. Joby and Archer, too, are doing a ton of manufacturing and regulatory work to make their aircraft safe and prove to regulators that they are. If those solutions are good enough for consumers, there’s a chance that Airbound is never able to reach the scale it needs to become cheaper than bikes and cars and trucks. If those solutions are good enough for businesses, and tailored to their logistics networks, there’s a chance that those businesses decide not to bend their operations to fit Airbound’s shape. There is also, to be sure, a world in which those companies win in America, and Airbound wins in India, where customers demand delivery that is fast and cheap, and in similar markets. It is hard to imagine a world where the vast majority of movement occurs on one company’s platform. That’s the world Naman imagines, though, or sees. Imagine is too fuzzy a word. Of course he wants to win India. It’s where he and Airbound are from. But he has no desire to build India’s best drone company. Made in India, Made for the World Way back in 2020, I wrote about Reliance Industries, India’s largest company. I was excited about investing in India then, and invested in a few startups there. The market was so large, its population so young and talented, its middle class growing, that there must surely be an opportunity to build large startups to serve it. I think I lost money on every one. One of the things that investors have to learn every few years is that the Indian consumer is so value-conscious that it’s hard to get them to pay much for software. And here I am again. In that Reliance essay, I wrote about Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Atmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyan, which translates to “Self-Reliant India Mission.” Mukesh Ambani, Reliance’s CEO, extended it, unveiling a new plan at the 2020 Annual General Meeting: “Made in India, Made for India.” Naman is pursuing a Made in India, Made for the World strategy, and he thinks that the same characteristics that make India so hard for consumer software make it the ideal place to build flying machines cheap enough to become ubiquitous. “India is a very value-conscious economy,” he told me, “and I think building for value is something that does not exist in Silicon Valley culture but exists in Indian culture.” Whereas Silicon Valley values capabilities, he believes India values efficiency. Way too many companies, in Naman’s opinion, treat making something possible as the critical thing, and making it affordable as something to address later. Serving a huge, price-sensitive market makes cost part of the initial requirements. It is also, as we have discussed, a place where consumers demand more from their delivery companies. He cites Meesho and Zepto and Blinkit as examples of companies working intensely on delivery economics and speed. He recalls a conversation he had with a founder in SF. When Naman told the founder what he was building, the founder asked something like, “Well, how much faster could you make delivery than 45 minutes anyway?” “Food coming in 45 minutes in India,” he replied, “means that you must live in the middle of nowhere.” Recalling that conversation and his own experiences, he said, “I’m still continually amazed by the low standards that Americans have for deliveries in general.” And finally, in India, serving a mass market with low prices is the path to profits. “It is by catering to that large demographic of people that you can really make money,” he explained. If you can make it in India, the logic goes, you can make it anywhere. And if you truly want to move all movement to the sky, to not just deliver things people currently order faster and cheaper but to move people and change the way we store and move everything, you need to design a product that is cheap and ubiquitous enough to meet the exacting standards of the Indian consumer. Building products and services affordable enough for everyone used to be what America did. “I feel like this is a deeply American value that has just been lost over the past century,” Naman said. Ford described the Model T as “large enough for the family, but small enough for the individual to run and care for,” priced so anyone with a decent salary could own one. Naman’s goal is similar, but airbound: “I want to offer an experience that everyone can afford.” That is an ideological stand, and an economic one. If you move a little bit of movement to the air, you make people’s lives a little bit more convenient. If you move a lot of movement to the air, you change the shape of the world once again. Reshaping the World Again In his Manifesto, Naman predicts the ways in which the world will change if Airbound wins. What it describes is that Airbound will fit into the existing shape of the world at first, making things a little bit better, faster, and cheaper. Over time, as the world metabolizes the new capabilities, it will begin to reshape itself around fast, versatile, and cheap flight, the way that it has around ships, containers, trains, planes, and cars. Last-mile logistics will stop batching and send things as ordered, from distribution centers located outside of cities instead of on valuable real estate, and what people can and will order will change, too. They might order food from their favorite restaurant on the other side of town, or decide to rent outfits for each occasion instead of wasting apartment space storing clothes. People themselves may choose to remain in cities that become more walkable, as drones enter from the top of buildings, like birds, and cars, roads, and parking lots go the way of the dodo. They may also choose to move somewhere with more land and more space, more nature, more family and friends, without giving up the economic opportunity that has long been bundled with urban centers. New York and Philadelphia, my two hometowns, which the Erie Canal sorted into winner and runner-up, will become one accessible metropolitan area. Humanity’s efficient frontier will move outward, and so will we. Marchetti smiles. Of course, these are just guesses. Naman doesn’t think he needs to figure out delivery handoffs yet, let alone architect the cities and towns of the future. But there is precedent. Every transportation technology to date has altered our geography in one of two ways: batch machines grouped us into hubs, and cars spread us out along roads reaching out from them. Cheap flight expands the map in every direction, all at once, connecting every point on the map to all others, making the physical world as traversable as the internet. The internet, with its point-to-point connections, reshaped the way that information moves. It feels obvious now, the water we swim in, but it wasn’t always. In 1945, Vannevar Bush wrote “As We May Think” about a world in which anyone could reach any piece of human knowledge, instantly, from their desk. At the time, information moved the way matter does now: in batches, on schedules, through hubs, with a human chaperone, a mailman carrying your letter or a paper boy chucking a newspaper onto your lawn. Bush imagined that information technology would offer a better way, and he was right. He didn’t predict which email clients, blogs, and YouTube channels would be popular, just that things like those would become possible. Fast, cheap, and easy access to information, anywhere in the world at any time changed the world dramatically. It is the reason that a fifteen-year-old kid stuck in his parents’ house in India during COVID was able to learn physics, engineering, and manufacturing, find collaborators, and build his first drone. His next drones, the ones he built with talented people and more resources and knowledge earned from making the first one, and then the next, and then the next might ultimately do to matter what the internet did to information. We are so used to our world that we don’t appreciate how deeply we’ve transformed it to fit our transportation technologies. We enter from the street instead of the roof, because our vehicles and feet are stuck to the ground. Even the stoop I sit on watching the birds is a consequence of our transportation technology. New York’s rowhouses got their high stoops, stairs climbing up a story to the main entrance, the story goes, to lift the front door above streets full of horse shit. Twice a week, garbage cans line up at the bottom of it waiting for a truck, because even trash moves in batches. The Amazon DC I run past in Red Hook takes up land that should be houses, because vans can only carry packages so far, so fast. My great-great-grandparents took a steamship into New York City instead of Philadelphia when they came over from Italy, because the Erie Canal made it economical to send that boat back to the motherland full of food. My wife’s parents came to New York from India because, thanks to those 19th century ships full of immigrants and food, New York became the city of opportunity in the land of opportunity. And my wife and I live here now for the same reason. We may never move from here, or we might one day move to the suburbs to give our kids a backyard without sacrificing the opportunities this city offers. Either way, it would be a choice instead of a trade-off. Neither Naman nor I pretend to know what we will choose, what anyone will choose when handed the keys to a new efficient frontier. “I think my job,” he told me, “is just to make these possibilities obvious.” Thanks to Naman, Relina, and to those of you who provided feedback. That’s all for today. We’ll be back in your inbox with a Weekly Dose on Friday. Noise is often a concern with drones, as highlighted in the NYT article, but here, less weight helps, too. Most of a drone’s noise comes from its rotors, and the harder they have to push air down to hold the aircraft up, the louder they get. A fully loaded V2 weighs about a fifth as much as Amazon’s drone, and once it’s cruising, its wings do the lifting and the propellers only have to push it forward. Naman says that only the person receiving the delivery will hear the drones, and then for about 30 seconds. Plus, if he’s right, we’re going to be getting rid of a lot of noisy cars. This is another case of “I wanna be one of my kids”- giving legs ( I mean wings) to that phrase. Well done and two of my favorite subjects- planes and boats! This is another case of “I wanna be one of my kids”- giving legs ( I mean wings) to that phrase. Well done and two of my favorite subjects- planes and boats!