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Solar-Powered Ultralight To Try 24-Hour Flight
blair1q writes "When the solar aircraft Solar Impulse lifts off from an airfield in Switzerland on a sunny day at the end of June, it will begin the first ever manned night flight on a plane propelled exclusively by power it collects from the sun. Former Swiss Air Force pilot Andre Borschberg and round-the-world balloonist Bertrand Piccard developed the aircraft, and Borschberg will be the pilot for this mission. 'The flight will require a lot of attention and concentration — the plane doesn't have an auto-pilot, it has to be flown for 24 hours straight.' For him, the most exciting part of the venture is 'being on the plane during the day and seeing the amount of energy increasing instead of decreasing as on a normal aircraft.'"
Today the answer to everything seems to be solar power. But before we all get swept up in this fad, let's consider. For every action, there is an equal opposite reaction, said Albert Einstien. Every time yu use up sun rays, you take away energy from the sun. Do these enviro-hippies want to burn out the source of all life and live on a dark ball of ice? They don't care, they are too hopped up on Italian marijuana to think about the consequences of their "innovations." Let's stick to what works, good, clean natural coal power. God bless America!
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How about soaring and using ridge lift? Ridge lift has been long used by glider pilots for cross-country flights. This planes seems to be a good enough sailplane. I has large aspect ratio wings and lift to drag ratio is probably decent as well, even though it does not look very streamlined, but it the ratio of the lift to drag that matters and this thing has a lot of lift.
Combined, solar and thermal energy (i.e. the energy of thermal air updraft) would yield a plane that could stay in the air forever.
I had a peek at TFA so I could comment. This thing would fall apart in a thermal. Ridge lift means flying fast to avoid flying into the rotor behind the hill. Its not uncommon to pull a couple of Gs flying into and out of a thermal and this aircraft doesn't look up to it to me.
My guess is they are waiting for still air before they fly it. Look at the size of those control surfaces. Sure it will have a high LD but at 30 knots or so.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I wouldn't fly an ultralight for any period of time even if it ran on AvGas
The Official Solar Impulse website at epfl
Hmm... flying desert bus
No way that can go wrong.
Not that I mind a bit of ego-wanking.
But human flight in this is limited by the pilot's endurance, so a theoretically indefinite duration is good for no more than 48 hours or so in practice.
The same concept, but with remote/autonomous* control, yields really indefinite-loiter UAVs -- a much more practical creature.
*Yes, I'm aware full autonomous control isn't feasible now, and begs for skynet jokes. But some automation for station-keeping without 100% human intervention is possible and highly desirable....
I get tired if I drive for more than 4 hours straight. When you get tired, you make mistakes. I can't even imagine driving continously for 24 hours without making an error. Surely this is dangerous, both for pilot and anyone he might crashland on?
I can't believe that they couldn't allow even one of those inflatable ones because of the weight...
It has the wingspan of a super jumbo jet, yet can only hold one person. It can fly endlessly, but not nearly as fast as jet based aircraft, and the whole body needs to be covered in expensive solar cells. Yeah. That's progress.
Seriously. The only practical use for this thing is as a proof of concept, or as a spy plane or mapper. There is no way in hell it will ever scale to commercial mass transit. I applaud their efforts though as it may lead to more efficient aircraft designs and energy storage technologies.
Unfortunately I think natural energy sources like solar, wind, etc. will be hard pressed to replace fossil fuels without more efficient energy storage and transportation. It's just too little and too diffused. To really solve our energy needs, we need much more efficient transportation and storage of energy. Storage is key. If you can reliably gather and store large amounts of energy, you could potentially harness the bigger energy sources around us, like lightning or the movement in the earth's crust. Of course fusion power would also be a great development, but it looks to be a long time until we can use that.
I just have this to say to you Mr. Picard, "make it so!"
Monstar L
I'm guessing he's going to use the same method Superman uses to stay awake and vigilant all that time.
If it was not spelled out in the rules I would pick a place further to the north where the sun does not set at this time of the year. Then they could get a full 24 hours of sunlight to drive the motors.
When the sun goes down the aircraft will either need to glide or operate off of power from batteries. If the sun "did not" go down for 24 hours you could sustain flight without batteries or by depending upon gliding. Then the only limit is how long the pilot(s) could remain in the air.
Tisha Hayes
... it's magic!
Not in the sense it's something beyond the laws of Physics but something we could only dream of just dozens of years ago.
It's exciting to live in this era.
"... and seeing the amount of energy increasing instead of decreasing as on a normal aircraft."
More realistically, at night the craft is totally decreasing energy as it depletes its batteries. The real test is to see if it can sustain ample altitude during the night until the solar panels are able to harvest energy the following morning.
Still, this is a huge leap for solar power and represents a great accomplishment. I'm sure the military is watching closely. Sustained flight with solar power is a holy grail...until compact thorium nuclear becomes feasible!!!
I'm guessing it only works when you launch in the morning and fly west, seeing how you'd get more daylight hours :)
--edfardos
They are planning the first night flight to be close to the summer solstice. I suspect they will conduct their initial testing during while the day's are longer, and continue testing as they get shorter.
If they can fly all night north of 22 degrees latitude, and past the fall equinox, I will be extremely impressed.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
I imagine if you fly west during the day and east during the night you could stay powered a long time. I'd still like to see someone build an unmanned craft that can stay in flight indefinitely powered by Sun and battery.
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solar is also nuclear power. They just located the solar system's central fusion reactor 93 million miles away.
hmmmm, I would claim all power eventually comes from nuclear sources, but then you brought up tidal. That's just extracting existing potential energy, but damn if I can explain where it came from originally...
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Why not a high alt blimp? The military already uses them for refueling stations.
say what, now?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
The fact that it's going to be a full moon won't hurt! :-)