Solar Plane Completes 24-Hour Flight

asukasoryu writes "An experimental solar-powered plane landed safely Thursday after completing its first 24-hour test flight, proving that the aircraft can collect enough energy from the sun during the day to stay aloft all night. The record feat completes seven years of planning and brings the Swiss-led project one step closer to its goal of circling the globe using only energy from the sun. The team will now set its sights on an Atlantic crossing, before attempting a round-the-world flight in 2013." We ran a story about the flight's departure yesterday.

Comments

Re:How about winter flight

[eln]

You're right. The original Wright Flyer barely made it off the ground in optimum conditions, there's no way it would have made it in poor weather, and it certainly wouldn't get me across the country in a reasonable amount of time. Clearly this whole heavier-than-air flight nonsense is wildly impractical and we should stop trying to make it work.

Solar powered flight is evolving just like any technology, and it's currently in its infancy. It may or may not ever prove to be practical, but abandoning it just because an experimental craft has shortcomings we don't think a fully mature product should have would be silly.

Re:Probably not

[Chibi Merrow]

Um, maybe not. Huge wing span and slow? Perfect target. Not a useful payload. Hugh amounts of electronics needed by a drone and....the military doesn't care about the costs of fuel or operation. Land it. Fuel it up. Send it out again. This is not a military technology.

Disclaimer: I work with the FAA on UAS system integration into the NAS, so my opinions are a bit coloured by my experiences.

I don't think you're imaginative enough about the types of missions our military wants to fly. Yes, a slow moving large UAS is not useful for low altitude fast turnaround tactical type missions, but that's what a Raven is for.

Something like this, though, would be invaluable for long duration surveillance type missions, like monitoring borders in Iraq and Afghanistan for weapons smuggling. Stick something like this at high altitudes to do autonomous surveillance and deploy more agile solutions on an as-needed basis to check out potential targets the high altitude UAS detects. The plans for UAS systems are very layered approaches, with room for little soldier-deployable RC craft, short ranged attack/reconnaissance craft, and high altitude, long-range, long duration surveillance craft.

You might think that the military will just "land and refuel" a UAS when necessary because money is no object, but that implies the existence of established airbases in the theater the UAS will be operating in, or long travel times to and from its mission which further reduce their loiter time. So, no, it's not as simple as "money is no object".

Honestly, the period that UASes are most at risk is on landing and take-off, both from hostile ground fire and just simple things like wind gusts dashing them against the ground or knocking them over. Having a UAS system that rarely has to land and take off would immensely improve their reliability and life expectancy.

So in summary, yeah, I think the military would be very interested in this type of technology.