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Solar Plane Breaks Endurance Record
calmond writes with this excellent snippet from CNET News: "QinetiQ Group PLC claimed Sunday that its propeller-driven aircraft called Zephyr flew for 83 hours and 37 minutes non stop, more than doubling the official world record set by Northrop Grumman's Global Hawk in 2001. The Zephyr is much different from the Global Hawk, which is about the size of a fighter and requires runway for taking off and landing. Zephyr, on the other hand, is an ultra-lightweight carbon-fiber aircraft that weighs less than 70lbs and is designed to launch by hand. The little aircraft flies on solar power generated by amorphous silicon arrays covering the aircraft's paper-thin wings. It is powered day and night by rechargeable lithium-sulfur batteries that are recharged during the day using solar power."
Manned aircraft still have that record beat. Humm several days in an airplane... What fun.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
These little planes might be useful in disaster situations, when ordinary comms are down. Wi-Fi capability has already been crammed into the SD card form factor. Seems likely that a very light weight Wi-Fi access point could be constructed as well. With that, how many of these planes would need to be launched to provide a communications network over an area wrecked by an earthquake or a flood?
If I get to set my own rules, I can break records, too.
Maybe. That doesn't mean their record isn't legitimate, especially if the "rule" they disregarded was irrelevant, and especially since they have flown further than anybody else.
After all, I am strangely colored.
If my hunch is correct, then QinetiQ isn't very upset by not being listed as a world-record-breaker with this flight. Qinetic is a military contractor. Unless I'm completely mistaken, this plane being constructed with so much carbon fiber, wouldn't it have a very small (perhaps non-existent) radar signature? I'm sure it could carry a small payload, like reconnaisance cameras, for instance? All that plus no need to refuel, and I'd say that the military would be very interested in contracting QinetiQ to build a fleet of these for them. I'd also imagine that you could include a satellite uplink to the payload, and never have to even have the thing land in order to download it's recorded recon data.
Exactly that or off a small catapult which they still consider "hand launched"
I think the quasi-satellite implications of this really can't be overlooked. Shooting things into space, especially into a geosynchronous orbit is really expensive. Shooting things simply into orbit is still extremely expensive AND you need to launch multiple satellites to get continuous coverage. If you could pop a few of these up at a fraction of the costs, you could get massive coverage, extremely cheaply.
For a place like the US that would be neat and useful, but where it would REALLY pay dividends would be in places like India where they have shitty infrastructure and a democratic government that can't blast peoples' houses easily to make way for new infrastructure (like they can in China). If you could toss a few of these up over India, you could cheaply (much cheaper than laying down land lines or towers) get some serious coverage even to remote places with bad roads.
Perhaps for military use it's desirable to fly that low, but another way to get a solar plane flying forever is to get it light enough and get the sink rate low enough (1 foot/second) that it can glide all night (100000 feet -> 40000 feet) and still be in the lower stratosphere by sunrise. That way you don't need batteries, and you'll always be above the clouds and weather.
A plane designed for this will be flimsy and fly extremely slowly near ground (slower than walking speed), so it'd have to be launched and retrieved during calm weather, but once up, there would be very little to go wrong - at most latitudes it could circle in one spot indefinitely.
A platform with infinite flight time, but zero payload capability is of no use..
You're probably too young to remember seeing them, but the Echo series of communications satellites were simply 100 foot diameter mylar balloons. They were passive -- they had no payload at all -- but NASA was able to bounce radio signals off of them.
A stationary "mirror in the sky" might make for a good way to bounce radio signals into and out of a hostile area without the power requirements needed for satellite communications.
Just because there is no apparent practical application doesn't mean there will never be one. I am frequently amazed at what people can do with the simplest things.
John
Don't confuse a "feat" with a "record". Feats are what people do. Records are feats that can be proven to have happened. If an achievement is not properly documented, there's no way to know for sure whether it was done.
So it's not whether or not the feat was surpassed, it's whether the feat was surpassed in a way that can be verified. I can say to you that I've got a cure for cancer, or tell you that I can run 30 MPH barefoot, but neither claim means anything there's some verification of the process - some official body (EG: the American Medical Association in the United States) has performed testing to some standard process to verify that the cancer cure I claim actually works at least most of the time. (In medicine, almost nothing works 100% of the time, not even aspirin)
You and I have no particular doubt that they flew the time they're claiming. But if it has not passed the most widely recognized process for validating this record, the RECORD still stands, and will stand until the proper process has been followed to record the fact that the old record has been broken.
However, they have a plan, which entails aircraft like this flying for MONTHS ON END. So they probably don't much care about documenting the record, since their numbers are likely to improve dramatically over the next year or so. Why go through the effort of documenting what is, for them, a rather minor, incremental step, solely to prove a record?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Take a chill, dude. I just thought it was an interesting contrast. Obviously, Amnesty Int isn't doubt the military's trustworthiness about a flight record for which the military would suffer the consequences for being wrong. I didn't intend it as a criticism.
And it's a REDUNDANT statement in my sig, tyvm! :-P
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.