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.'"

Comments

What a feat!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:24 hours straight? Dangerous!

[JockTroll]

Correction: the plane doesn't have an autopilot nor, as it looks like, any self-leveling device. It looks very stable, however and most important the pilot is a Swiss Airforce pilot and hence a real jock. As a jock, his mental and physical shape is vastly superior to the average and his abilities are way beyond the lesser men to comprehend. I'm confident that he will be up to the challenge to the great envy and rage of the inferior speciment of humankind.