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Zephyr Solar Plane Tops 7 Days Aloft
chichilalescu writes "The UK-built Zephyr solar-powered plane has smashed the endurance record for an unmanned aerial vehicle. The craft took off from the US Army's Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona at 1440 BST (0640 local time) last Friday and is still in the air. Maybe we can attach some netbooks, and extend the Internet to the clouds."
El reg has made some interesting points on this: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/07/16/zephyr_7_days/
The site and time of year chosen is about the most ideal conditions possible. Any real application would require a payload which would need to be carried and more critically powered which means more solar panels. I would guess that they would already be maxed out on the solar panel area though...
wot no sig
"Maybe we can attach some netbooks, and extend the internet to the clouds."
Really? That's the best way to summarise record-breaking solar flight? A stupid, and basically illogical, pun?
Remember these are just baby steps of solar powered flight. This in itself is quite an achievement, but there's still room for improvement. As solar panel technology gets better, so will the capabilities and usefulness of such projects in real life. However, i think just waiting for a better panel won't cut it - the rest can still be optimized, like internal circuitry, materials, the design and so on. That's why IMO it's important to keep making such prototypes. If (when?) we finally get better panels, we'll be all set with a proper aircraft architecture and, if we're lucky, it'll be able to sustain itself in every climate.
That said, the military will probably never release the specs to the public, so meh ;) .
"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams [...]."
why is one wing shaped differently than the other, i wonder..
You're right, there is a noticeable extra piece of wing on the right (looking from the rear)
The left wing appears to have an extension on the wing tip with negative dihedral: it points down. The guy on the right appears to be holding the tip extension, perhaps because they are assembling the aircraft.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
The current official world endurance record for a UAV is 30 hours, 24 minutes. This was set by the US robot Global Hawk. Zephyr itself has already recorded an 83-hour continuous flight but representatives from the Federation Aeronautique Internationale (FAI) were not present to witness proceedings.
However, they are at Yuma this time and so the latest flight will go down as an official world record provided the FAI is satisfied its rules have been followed.
They had better hurry up and end the light otherwise the FAI guy might give up and go home.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
One thing that many forget is that aircraft fly faster than storms so can always be somewhere else unless they have fuel limitations. Also I don't think any aircraft can handle a tornado so the high winds question is one of those "it's not perfect so we should never use it" senseless arguments.
I think it is more then logical that they would do it in the most ideal conditions possible. To me it is not even interesting. Remember that flight around the world in a balloon? Do you think they did not try to get the most ideal conditions?
First you start to see what happens in the most ideal situation. Then you have some reference point for more realistic situations later on in the project.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Its project manager, Jon Saltmarsh, said Zephyr would be brought down once it had flown non-stop for a fortnight.
"Zephyr is basically the first 'eternal aircraft'," he told BBC News.
Which makes for a decent observation plane, mostly for disaster-area surveillance (dunno military apps, though). QinetiQ seems to agree:
Potential applications for Zephyr include earth observation and communications relay.
I remember reading on ./ that the Nasa Pathfinder concept is comparable to a very-low-orbit satellite for practical purposes, even advancing the possibilities in Martian exploration.
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
Qinetiq is the commercial r+d arm of the UK military. They don't just build stuff for the fun of it.
A) their funding requires them to be hunting down sales and profit and B) they are the commercial spin off of the military (one of their biggest clients) so they sure as heck didn't spend years putting PhD level researchers on developing a solar flying wing just because they thought it would be a cool thing to do. They'll be expecting to make a profit out of this and for starters they'll be offering the US military a preferential deal (once they've got their patents also nicely sorted to cover any competitors and given the UK military first shout on the best stuff).
The problem is that you are limited by the amount of sunlight that reaches the earth. Even with solar panel efficiency at 100% you would only have about one kilowatt/square meter.