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Solar-Powered Airplane Completes First International Flight
liqs8143 writes "Solar Impulse, a fully solar-powered airplane, has completed its first international solar-powered flight. After a flight lasting 12 hours 59 minutes at an altitude of 12,400 feet, using no fuel and propelled by solar energy alone, Solar Impulse HB-SIA landed safely in Brussels, Switzerland. After the landing, company co-founder Bertrand Piccard said, 'Our goal is to create a revolution in the minds of the people . . . to promote solar energies — not necessarily a revolution in aviation.' Compared with 2003, energy efficiency has increased from 16 to 22 percent. And the cells are now half as thick. The project has a total cost of $88 million, which is funded by mostly-Swiss partners and public donations."
That would be _to_ Brussels, _from_ Switzerland, I'm guessing.
Switzerland to Belgium. So it wasn't just a hop across an adjacent border. And, as the summary says, they were in the air for almost 13 hours.
sustainable living
If they were moving 1cm per minute (spending all its energy just staying up), then they could have only traveled 7.8m. Time doesn't mean much.
If they had a helicopter that hovered for 13 hours at such a low speed it would be even more impressive.
What, like a party balloon?
The summary isn't very clear about the flight path. Clearly, this is the work of 'Wrong Way' Corrigan.
Have gnu, will travel.
Solar Impulse HB-SIA landed safely in Brussels, Switzerland. ... never knew Brussels was part of Switzerland ...O wait ... guess I should go hand in my Belgian passport and go request a Swiss one ....
Damn
Awesome Geography ./ !
So it went through Switzerland, France, and Belgium?
Still not that impressive; I'm working on a boomerang capable of traveling across four US states, which I plan to test in New Mexico.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
I actually did RTFA, and none of the articles mention the embarkation point. They mention mission control in Payerne, and that the plane went over the Jura mountains, and that the plane landed in Brussels, but never states where it took off from.
The summary isn't good (Brussels Switzerland?), but the articles suck.
This sentence no verb.
Is it just me, or is youtube not meeting demand on Sunday afternoons and evenings? Or is it comcast?
you have the laws of flight working against you on this. I doubt the flow of air at 1 cm / min (3.7 10^-4 MPH) would create the lift needed to keep the plane in the sky. Perhaps if it were a solar powered blimp...
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"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
" It FLEW. It didn't crawl or roll."
Hot air balloons fly too "using no fuel" and I'm sure they could be propelled forward using solar too.
Flight distance from Switzerland to Belgium is only 320 miles (487 km). That's only 26 mph (40 kph). A solar powered car is over twice as fast.
At an average speed of 26 mph this isn't an airplane, it's a glider, as you can see from this extremely slow speed take-off
The $94 million wasted on this would have been better spent on improving solar powered cars rather than a 26mph glider.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
I didn't fly across the Atlantic, a savings of 100%
Gently reply
The red tape they had to wade through to authorize it was much more painful... Actually crossing the EU probably isn't so bad... wait till they try to fly around the world.. Getting the proper clearances will take much longer than the trip itself... Just ask Dick Rutan
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
"With this flight, we would like to encourage politicians to opt for more ambitious energy policies,"
The point of the project is to attract attention to solar power and they seem to be doing a good job of that.
sorry about the flight distance, the 487km came from this link
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
I'm not impressed. Solar planes have been in existence for a while. http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/technologies/solarFarm.html I really won't be impressed until it can carry cargo or passengers.
Point ---> x
You ---> x
Repetition does not transform a lie into the truth. - FDR
Brussels is in Belgium. Obviously the Article was submitted by an American. I assume this was a Switzerland to Brussels flight. A few hundred kilometers. More if I see flight details.
The 'unshorten' site saved me from your troll, but there is a phenomenon I just discovered has a name, which sounds very trollish, called 'cloud suck'. It can keep you aloft for a very long time and even kill you if it carries you too high. Hang gliders beware! And slashdotters beware of almost everybody with a UID over 2000000...
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Actual flight path in title. Approx 660km @ 50km / hr, with cleared airspace due to special needs. See http://www.solarimpulse.com/blog/2011/05/13/all-lights-at-green/ Herzliche Glückwünsche to the team.
To introduce errors that we can all laugh at, of course! Daily lulz!
Switzerland to Belgium. So it wasn't just a hop across an adjacent border. And, as the summary says, they were in the air for almost 13 hours.
Three hundred miles is what someone says further down the thread. Not far by standards of the northern half of the western hemisphere. So again, the headline shouldn't be pimping the international aspect, rather the time aspect (which IS impressive).
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
The summary isn't good (Brussels Switzerland?), but the articles suck.
Hrm, Slashdot isn't raising its standards to meet the rest of the world, the rest of the world is lowering theirs to meet slashdot...
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
It seems to be a publicity stunt. I find it very unlikely that it'll ever be efficient to lug solar cells around on a plane - not to say that there won't be airliners run from solar power, just that generating that power onboard, in real time, seems ridiculously wasteful. The panels add weight, restrict the design, and depend on the aircraft being in the light pretty much continuously; rather than trying to cram a few square metres of solar cells on the wings, why not just use a whole field full of the things on the ground to produce the energy, and load it onto the plane in the form of (say) hydrogen?
The biggest problem I can see with getting up to jet speeds with an electric vehicle is the method of propulsion. How can you propel an e-plane aside from using a conventional prop? Perhaps the ducted fan could eventually replace the turbo prop.
To give you an idea how fast that was. The Pony Express could do the three hundred miles in less time, at a cost of far less than 88 Million $.I know gliders that have traversed the Appalachia mountains in single day, a distance that is far greater. I still think the pedal powered flight from England to France is more impressive.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Hot air balloons don't generate lift using aerofoils, they float using a large bag of hot lighter-than-the-surrounding air, and they use large propane burners to keep that bag's contents warm - so they do use fuel. They also only have gross control - up and down. Their direction of travel is largely subject to prevailing winds.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
Speaking of pedal power, I wonder how that human helicopter did the other day. Local news said the first flight didn't work, but a second one was scheduled.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
why not just use a whole field full of the things on the ground to produce the energy, and load it onto the plane in the form of (say) hydrogen?
You're pretty much right, this is largely a publicity stunt. No reasonably sized aircraft would be able to replenish a significant portion of its energy budget from the sunlight that lands on its body.
However, there is one niche where a solar powered aircraft would make sense -- lightweight drones that are meant run autonomously and stay up in the air for months or years at a time. For them, being able to "refuel" every day without landing anywhere would be a big plus.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
I am deeply sorry, but I have to agree with TheNAM666 here. This does look like a typical American write-up. Just like that time a security lady at an airport in the US was questioning me about why my Dutch passport was made in Switzerland. It got made at the consulate in Stockholm. Or that time when the Israeli border check said the same damn thing.
I have found that both Americans and Israelis have displayed the most spectacular levels of ignorance about the world outside of their own country. More so than other travelers and people I've met in my life. That's not to say all Americans and Israelis are stupid, far from it. It's just that the ratio of numbnuts to decent conversationalists is significantly higher.
Coolest example ever was when Dutch customs at Schiphol airport were looking for something because they were asking every passenger that passed through a certain spot where they just arrived from. They put the question in Dutch first. An American lady in front of me looked at the customs officer and in reply to his "Pardon Mevrouw, waar komt uw vlucht vandaan?" she barked an irritated "I don't speak German".
He smiled, inclined his head and replied "That's alright, madam. Neither do I."
So when i say I'm going from Washington to Denver by road and it takes less than 4 hours.
Or
I'm going from London to Paris by road and it takes less than an hour.
What countries am I in?
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
Aircraft require more high density energy than any other thing humans do (besides spacecraft). Getting off the ground with any significant amount of cargo and traveling at a useful speed of several hundred knots requires many gigajoules of energy. Only fossil fuels have that kind of energy density and power output : even nuclear is too darn heavy compared to jet fuel.
In the long run, eventually we'll run out of recoverable fossil fuel. There'll still be plenty of it in the ground, but the energy cost to remove one barrel of oil will be too high for it to be economically feasible. (if it took 1/2 or 1/3 a barrel of oil in energy to recover one barrel of output, it would probably not even be worth it).
At that point, we'll have to convert all our cars and trucks to electrically driven vehicles : not from batteries, but from wires above or in the road (or both). Robotic vehicles that grab onto an overhead wire and a rail in the pavement at the same time on the straight aways, switching to ultra-capacitors when they change lanes or make turns is what I am thinking of.
We'll power everything with nuclear or vast arrays of solar and wind. And for airplanes, we'll have to make jet fuel synthetically from coal or even from CO2 extracted right from the air.
Everything I just named already exists. Some of the engineering details have not been worked out, but it's just a matter of money. So don't panic, the Western world will be fine.
It's OK. Slashdot groupthink on this one seems to be "so what?" Apparently that's how crap comparing this glider to a party balloon gets modded informative.
...it took of in Helsinki, Sweden.
> I find it very unlikely that it'll ever be efficient to lug solar cells around on a plane - not to say that there won't be airliners run from solar power, just that generating that power onboard, in real time, seems ridiculously wasteful.
I used to think so, but I have kind of changed my mind. There are a number of points in favour of adding solar cells:
a) If you can integrate them into the wing surface, the impact should be minimal.
b) Planes fly above the clouds, so you get more sunshine hours and higher energy than on the ground.
c) Fuel is heavy, too, and a significant amount of fuel is required just to get the rest of the fuel off the ground.
d) Planes last a long time - so you should be able to amortise quite nicely.
So overall there seems to be a case for it, especially as additional power on long distance flights. It may not be there yet, but the time will come.
The Solar Challenger did a 262km international flight from England to France in 1981. Given that the Solar Impulse has a max speed of 50km/h (from TFA) and was in the air almost 13 hours, that suggests a flight in the neighborhood of 600km. Not bad but then, one would expect some progress after 30 years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Challenger
The video is a fake. No way is Switzerland that flat.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Switzerland is not a member of the EU so it does not make sense to move the de-facto capitol of said union there. Why not just keep it to Brussels, Belgium instead?
--frank[at]unternet.org
Last time I checked Brussels was in Belgium.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
No no – it landed in Brussels in Switzerland. Glad to see that the US version of geography is alive and well.
In 13 hours they only went 660 km? Thats not likely to be a practical alternative to jet powered planes. And its not like they can keep going much longer than that, solar power is not so good at night.
The batteries were at a higher level of charge at landing. They did produce fuel.
My main issue with Solar Impulse is that it is not a solar powered aircraft but a sailplane with a solar powered assist. It uses stored electricity to get to altitude then uses standard sailplane techniques to get where it is going. You may call thermals and ridge lift (lift crated by wind being pushed up hill) solar power but it has nothing to do with solar panels. They probably use electricity to move from one area of lift to another but it is not the main source of energy. Considering that the sailplane distance record is almost 1000km, flying 500km with some electrical assist is not a great feat.
Why is the stated average speed of Solar Impulse 70km/hr but it took 12+hours to go 500km (average forward speed 42km/h). The reason is that they spend half their time using local lift instead of going forward.
I would like to see how far Solar Impulse would fly if it took off, set a course and flew straight until it ran out of electricity. That would be a valid comparison with today's fossil fuelled aircraft.
I've always knew there was something cheesy about Brussel-Halle-Vilvoorde!
I'm going to get my Swiss-Belgian passport right now!
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
I don't know, I'd be interested in an aeroplane that flew at 40km/h and had no fuel costs. I could pop across the water and visit my mother in about an hour (including the time getting to the nearest airfield at both ends). On the other hand, going via land takes 3-5 hours depending on the mode of transport.
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Batteries or other forms of energy storage are heavy too. You would need them in many classes of practical solar powered planes.
In the event we run really low on petroleum what would be more common is generating fuel on the ground (hydrocarbons from biofuel, solar, nuclear or whatever) and then filling up a conventional jet plane with it. That way passenger planes can still travel at 900+kph.
Solar powered planes on the other hand might be useful as drones or "satellites".
No offense, but wouldn't it make more sense to use an electrical (or solar powered, i.e. sail-) boat?
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
Not really. The water is the Bristol Channel. At low tide, the water goes out about a mile on each side, and the tides move the water quite fast perpendicular to the direction of travel. You're also crossing some very busy shipping lanes, which is not fun in a small boat.
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No offense, but wouldn't it make more sense to use that gallon or two of fuel it would take for a cessna to make the trip in a quarter the time? Surely fuel prices could never be high enough to make up for the millions of dollars difference in cost between the two aircraft.
But that's now - I imagine that solar aircraft will become significantly cheaper in the future. Five years ago, I bought some solar-powered garden lights for about £10 each. I just bought some more for 98p each, and the new ones are much brighter than the old ones ever were. Most of the cost of a solar aircraft is R&D, once that's paid for it becomes a lot cheaper.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
No, the method of propulsion is easy. The hard part is the power source. Even small turboprop aircraft operate in the megawatt range. Any airliner is going to operate in the hundred megawatt range or better. We have no battery storage technology that can provide anything like the needs of high speed flight for any significant duration.
They're both very hard, bordering on impossible, problems. Care to share an electric thruster capable of propelling an airliner at 1000kph?
You seem to be woefully ignorant in the scale of what you propose. This aircraft has a wing area of some 200m^2, or roughly that of an old 757. With that wing area, allowing for reduced dispersion in the atmosphere, and high efficiency commercially available cells, you might expect as high as 50kW peak generating capacity. For 450knot+ flight speed, you're looking to replace two turbofans with an output likely somewhere around 50MW each. Under the best conditions, you're three whole orders of magnitude off where you need to be. On a big airliner, 50kW wouldn't even come close to enough to run the avionics, lighting, and air supply.
There is NO commercial worth to solar powered airliner. There really is no worth to manned solar powered research aircraft, as the needs of a pilot are far greater than that of any worthwhile payload. This is nothing more than a $100M publicity stunt.
I doubt the flow of air at 1 cm / min (3.7 10^-4 MPH) would create the lift neede
Might be just a lot of hot air blowing from Brussels.
Apparently its heaven for glider pilots.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
A ducted fan hooked up to a 50-100MW electric motor. All the hard part has been done. Just take an existing high bypass turbofan and replace the core with a (big ass) electric motor.
Once you get away from the R&D costs, solar panels are simply damned expensive to produce. You're looking at several hundred thousand dollars just to fill that wing with panels, and another hundred thousand for the batteries. Beyond that, large composite structures take a lot of time and money to manufacture. I wouldn't be surprised if the thing cost upwards of a million per unit in volume.
I thought the Swiss were always neutral, when did they invade Belgium?
While everyone is focused on the middle east, the Swiss are taking over Europe!
~Syberz
Strangely, all notable figures by this name in Wikipedia are balloonists/scientists and so is the founder of this company. Now we know why it is Captain Picard in the Star Trek series.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piccard
I wonder, if you could capture 80% of the solar energy that hit an aircraft the size of something like Boeing's BWB concept (say roughly an equilateral triangle with the length of an A380's wingspan), how much energy would that be?
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IAAP but IANAAE (I Am a Pilot but I Am Not an Aeronautical Engineer)
Other than a 'hey, that's cool' factor, I don't get what the big deal here is. There's not a lot of information in the article or the video, but the suggestion is that this is some kind of breakthrough in powered flight.
A little bit of background: Even a small, single-engine airplane will burn 6-8 gallons of aviation gas per hour, and AVGAS is about $6/gallon (in the US - probably even more in Europe), and this is one of several reasons why aviation is increasingly inaccessible -- in the US alone, we had about 800,000 pilots in 1980, but today we have under 600,000. You won't rent even a two-seater for much less than $90/hr, which turns into $120-130 if you have a flight instructor there too.
So there is a lot of attention on alternative power sources for airplanes, but the big problem is weight. Most single engine airplanes already have weight issues -- a lot of your 4-seater aircraft like the Cessna 172 may have spots for 4 people, but (particularly with Americans these days...) you're unlikely to get 4 adults in there without going over max takeoff weight, even if you dump out half your fuel.
So in the practical category of 'planes with people in them,' this isn't really relevant -- the thing is a sailplane with a solar-powered assist and has probably had every ounce of material removed that can be removed. It's still pretty cool, since there are definitely uses for long-endurance UAV aircraft out there - but even small airplanes aren't going to be using solar (not enough juice) or batteries (too heavy) anytime soon. There are some concept electric designs out there, but the ones I've read about are either too slow or can't stay up for very long. The HB-SIA can only operate under very calm wind conditions (50 km/h won't go anywhere at altitude with a head wind) and with a lot of extra separation done by ATC as the article says.
I, for one, welcome our solar-powered Brussels-annexing Swiss overlords!
It can actually fly all night without interruption and then recharge batteries during the next day for the night after that: http://www.solarimpulse.com/blog/2010/07/08/keep-the-spirit-alive/ and http://www.gizmag.com/solar-impulse-aircraft-night-flight/15663/ (and obviously, the aim of this first prototype is to be a proof-of-concept and to carry a message, not compete with commercial airlines!)
You seem to be woefully ignorant in the scale of what you propose. This aircraft has a wing area of some 200m^2, or roughly that of an old 757. With that wing area, allowing for reduced dispersion in the atmosphere, and high efficiency commercially available cells, you might expect as high as 50kW peak generating capacity. For 450knot+ flight speed, you're looking to replace two turbofans with an output likely somewhere around 50MW each. Under the best conditions, you're three whole orders of magnitude off where you need to be. On a big airliner, 50kW wouldn't even come close to enough to run the avionics, lighting, and air supply.
There is NO commercial worth to solar powered airliner. There really is no worth to manned solar powered research aircraft, as the needs of a pilot are far greater than that of any worthwhile payload. This is nothing more than a $100M publicity stunt.
I think the biggest potential use for them is that they could theoretically stay aloft for very long periods of time, and so be used as drones, network repeaters, etc. Of course, it's got to either have some on board energy storage for night flying, or keep flying west at the same speed as the terminator (unlikely given the slow speed of this prototype, but for instance it could fly for months at a time during the daylight of Antarctica).
Did you mount a military-grade, variable-focus MASER on an unlicensed artificial intelligence?
Their potential as a drone is very useful. You can load up surveillance or communications packages, and let them loiter for months on end. NASA experimented with this a bit several years ago, but was shelved when unexpected turbulence over Hawaii caused excessive dihedral on the wing, eventually resulting in a breakup over the ocean.
The problem with manned flight is that between the pilot, cockpit structure, controls, avionics, water, food, and waste storage, you've got several hundred pounds of dead weight that must be centrally located on the wing. Should you want to operate at altitude, you're going to need a pressurized and heated cockpit and an oxygen supply or compressor pump. The centrally located payload results in significantly higher structural stress than if it were built into the wing, or located on multiple pylons distributed across the wing.