Adventurer targets first round world solar flight - Yahoo! News Huge huge wingspan to accomodate the PV array and it can apparently collect and store enough juice during the day to be able to continue to fly through the night.
Wow! that is incredible. I hope he makes it around the world successfully. Wouldn't it be amazing if this could be the way of passenger flight in the future. We can use the suns energy for all of our personal transport, and this is just another example.
It would be, but read the details....this plane has the wingspan of a 747 but only weighs a couple thousand pounds. Scale that up to passenger plane size and it'll be too huge to deal with unless we can get PVs and batteries to be MUCH more efficient.
I'm an optimist. I have faith in Man and the technology it comes up with. Even though I don't always understand the technology or the maths behind it. Actually the point of the exercise is to make people aware of the technology and benefits of the solar panels.
The plane has a capacity of one person: the pilot. However, there are no technological obstacles to using renewable energy (solar, wind, etc) to produce synthetic liquid fuels to power conventional airplanes.
Yeah, that's a pretty big picture, isn't it? Very cool plane. Great to see these kinds of projects as investments in alternatives. I wonder if a human-powered component was considered.
I once read about a human-powered airplane. It uses pedals like a bicycle, and requires an extreme athlete to power it. However, the solar airplane weighs thousands of pounds, and is intended to fly long distances, so any available human power would be negligible.
Yes, there are pedal-powered planes, though none capable of circumnavigation. Carrying enough food and water for a non-stop flight, never mind the endurance required, isn't yet possible. But if I was the pilot on a solar plane with low batteries and a distant sunrise, you can be sure I'd make darn good use of the pedals. As long as I could overcome some drag, it would help.
I don't think pedal power on a several-thousand-pound plane would get you more than 3 or 4 feet added range. You'd do better to gain altitude in the daytime when you have juice and the batteries are full, and then glide some if it looked like you were shy of making sunrise. Also, you'd want to fly west to east, to (slightly) reduce the length of the night.
Actually, according to the article, two pilots will man the flight. But for a 36 hour flight, I just want to know where are the toilets??? I think it's great and wish them success. Another example of viability of renewable energy, I hope it helps turn the tide on fossil fuels.
NASA had (or has) a plane very similar to this, but it was remotely operated. It could loiter nearly indefinitely at very high altitude: NASA - Solar Airplane Brings Electrical Breakthrough Down to Earth Tom
Here is any interesting piece that twines the other two sub-threads together and shows the possibility of solar powered personal aircraft... so long as it's sunny and doesn't rain -- short circuits and fire at altitude can be troublesome. YouTube - Solar Electric Powered Flight Like the PHEV and especially the EV, reliable, efficient solar powered personal flight awaits a lightweight, high density electrical storage medium.
AC Propulsion built a solar airplane that could stay aloft indefinitely, but it did not carry a person. Lithium polymer batteries are known for catching fire. LiFePO4, while holding less energy per kg, is more stable.
UPDATE: The Solar Impulse (possibly a newer or upgraded version) just completed a 24-hour flight, demonstrating that it can accumulate enough surplus sunlight during the day to fly all night. Story here. Video here. While this does not suggest commercial electric airliners any time soon, it does show the constant advances in solar cells and batteries, bringing ever closer the day when electric cars will surpass stinkers in every measure.
