After attending United Aircraft's entire offline roadshow, there are a few details I have been pondering over since returning.
If we follow today's ground transportation logic, a single province requires a massive infrastructure system comprising roads, parking spaces, gas stations, and more. According to a calculation by United Aircraft using Jiangsu as a case study, the investment required for Jiangsu's traditional transportation infrastructure alone is approximately 2.0147 trillion RMB. If transportation is moved to the low-altitude space, 50,000 helipads and 10 integrated energy stations would cost a combined total of about 550 million RMB, and the air routes themselves would hardly require large-scale physical construction like highways. The estimated infrastructure investment for these two systems differs by a factor of approximately 3,700.
Of course, this is a highly idealized corporate estimate. Actual implementation involves numerous variables such as airspace management, regulation, and operational density.
However, it suddenly made me understand what Tian Gangyin truly wanted to convey in this roadshow. What United Aircraft aims to do does not seem to be merely adding a "UAV supplementary capacity" to the existing ground transportation. It is attempting to ask a much bigger question: If we were to redesign a transportation system today, would we still need to follow the past logic of building roads, constructing stations, and maintaining vehicles?
This is why heavy-lift UAVs, tiltrotors, unmanned operations, helipads, energy stations, low-cost manufacturing, and route platforms ultimately all point to the same thing: shifting a portion of the transportation that originally occurs on the two-dimensional ground into three-dimensional space.
New Insight 1: What United Aircraft is Really Targeting Might Not Be the "UAV Market" at All
In the past, researching the low-altitude economy often started from the industry itself: how many billions for agricultural UAVs, how many billions for emergency firefighting, how many billions for low-altitude logistics in the future, and how large the eVTOL market is.
Citing public data, United Aircraft estimates that the current global passenger travel market is approximately 5.8 to 6.5 trillion USD, which could reach 8 to 9 trillion USD by 2030. This means that what it is truly attempting to penetrate is not an existing "low-altitude economy niche market" today, but the massive existing stock market jointly composed of automobiles, high-speed rail, civil aviation, taxis, and even urban public transportation.
The daily commute time acceptable to humans remains relatively stable. When speed increases and the accessible radius expands, the transportation capacity itself may create new travel demands. According to its model, transitioning from a ground road network of about 30 km/h to 3D point-to-point transportation at 550 km/h, driven by the combined effects of accessibility and travel frequency, could theoretically generate a 36-fold incremental market.
Tian Gangyin does not seem to be considering "how much of the cake the low-altitude sector can take from ground transportation," but rather whether the cake itself will grow larger after the mode of transportation changes. Viewing it from this perspective, looking back at why it is obsessed with heavy-lift, long-range, and unmanned capabilities, and why it is even pushing forward to build energy stations and take-off/landing points itself, many things suddenly make sense.
New Insight 2: United Aircraft is Securing the Ground Entry Points for Low-Altitude Transportation
This is also where I most easily overlooked United Aircraft previously. I had always understood it as an aircraft manufacturing company, but now it is clear that it is not satisfied with just ending the business after selling the aircraft.
It is attempting to package aircraft, take-off/landing points, integrated energy stations, routes, and operations together into regional low-altitude projects. Take-off/landing points can be integrated into communities, hospitals, scenic areas, and industrial parks; integrated energy stations simultaneously handle fuel, electricity, and hydrogen replenishment, as well as maintenance and logistics transit; and different nodes are then connected by routes and dispatch platforms.
Transportation infrastructure inherently possesses network attributes. A single helipad has limited value, and a single aircraft is merely equipment; however, when there are enough nodes, routes begin to connect, and flight volume forms, what latecomers need to replicate is no longer just an aircraft.
The infrastructure advantage of low-altitude transportation comes not only from flying in the air but also from whether nodes can be embedded into cities at low cost. This expands its revenue from equipment orders to node construction, routes, operations and maintenance, and data services. Once the first batch of county-level projects is successfully implemented, these first-mover assets will be much harder to replicate than standalone aircraft parameters.
New Insight 3: Fuel-Powered, Heavy-Lift, and Unmanned Capabilities All Serve the Same Purpose
Currently, the hottest narrative in low-altitude mobility basically revolves around all-electric eVTOLs, but United Aircraft's flagship models have consistently insisted on fuel power and have incorporated hydrogen energy into its subsequent energy system.
The energy density of aviation fuel and lithium batteries differs by approximately 20 times. For short-distance and light-load tasks, this may not constitute a decisive issue; but once missions involve long-distance, heavy-lift, and high-frequency operations, range and refueling efficiency will quickly become critical factors in the economic equation.
Therefore, the T1400 achieves a 650 kg payload and over 8 hours of endurance, while the R6000 is designed with a maximum commercial payload of 2 tons, a range of 4,000 km, and a cruising speed of 550 km/h. They are obviously not competing for the same short-distance commuting market.
If one day, air transport can truly achieve costs close to ground transport while providing point-to-point efficiency far exceeding that of ground transport, then the question of "which transportation scenarios UAVs will replace" might be asking too small a question.
Unmanned operations follow the same logic.
When one or two aircraft are operating, pilot costs are not a major issue; if hundreds or thousands of units of capacity need to be deployed across different regions in the future, the number of personnel will become the boundary for expansion. Therefore, United Aircraft has directly integrated unmanned operations, centralized command and control, and autonomous support into the entire system.
So looking at it now, "safety, ease of use, and low cost" are all aimed at answering the same question: Is there any possibility of scaling and replicating this mode of transportation?
United Aircraft has already obtained the first domestic type certificate for an unmanned helicopter with the TD550, the T1400 has entered the airworthiness certification process, and the R6000 has obtained a special flight permit and continues to advance towards cargo airworthiness. The Q100, Q20, TD550, T1400, and R6000 correspond to last-mile, feeder, and trunk line transportation, respectively. The initial shape of a capacity network ranging from a few kilograms to several tons, and from urban instant delivery to cross-regional transportation, is already visible.
What is more worth watching next is the first batch of regional projects.
In the past, I would ask: How big can United Aircraft become in the UAV industry? If it ultimately just sells more batches of UAVs, it remains a good aviation-grade UAV manufacturing company.
Now I am more curious to know: If it can truly use infrastructure on the scale of hundreds of millions of RMB to gradually leverage the transportation network that previously required trillions of RMB in investment to support, then in the future, should we view it as a UAV manufacturing company, or a company with the potential to redefine the cost structure of transportation?
This is a question I find highly worth looking forward to.
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