Airbus’s latest edition of Zephyr, a solar-powered aircraft-come-satellite that operates in the stratosphere, has completed a maiden flight just short of 26 days.
Taking off on 11th July in Arizona, USA, the unmanned Zephyr S HAPS (High Altitude Pseudo-Satellite) was airborne for 25 days, 23 hours and 57 minutes, a duration Airbus hopes to have confirmed as a world record in the coming days. Zephyr employs a 25m wingspan covered in solar panels to power its flight and charge its lithium-sulphur batteries, allowing it to cruise in the stratosphere for extreme lengths of time. The previous record was achieved by an earlier prototype in the Zephyr programme – the Zephyr 7 – achieving over 14 days of continuous flight.
“This very successful maiden flight represents a new significant milestone in the Zephyr programme, adding a new stratospheric flight endurance record which we hope will be formalised very shortly,” said Jana Rosenmann, head of Unmanned Aerial Systems at Airbus. “We will in the coming days check all engineering data and outputs and start the preparation of additional flights planned for the second half of this year from our new operating site at the Wyndham airfield in Western Australia.”
According to Airbus, the current version of the aircraft weighs just 75kg and is manufactured from carbon fibres thinner than a human hair. Zephyr’s extended flight capabilities make it a unique proposition for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISTAR) missions, and three aircraft are already in service with the RAF. The programme was initially started by Qinetiq back in 2003, with demonstration flights carried out for the US military in 2008. In 2013, the programme was sold to EADS Astrium, which would go on to become part of Airbus Defence and Space.
Airbus is catching up with Solar Impulse, that’s very good news, but not enough. Where is their civil aviation solar and/or electric program?
We are running out of time to correct Anthropogenic climate change.
http://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/research-news/2018-08-06-planet-at-risk-of-heading-towards-hothouse-earth-state.html
While aviation is one of the main negative contributors to ACC, it can become a positive one by switching to clean, renewable energy.
I have no doubt that in the long run someone will create workable electro-tech to transport us, several hundred tonnes at a time, around the planet, but it won’t be in time to save the catastrophe. What we need now is massive deployment of technologies already developed to create pourable fuels from the live carbon cycle. That way we stop adding new (fossil) carbon and at the same time start to drag on the enormous inventory of fossil carbon already mobilised into the atmosphere.
This is excellent news both for engineering and energy use. However it looks ike some time before a useful payload could be carried.
One way to cut air pollution ,which is like a herd of elephants in the room , is to tax aircraft fuel. Why is it beyond the co-operation of Govts. worldwide to sort out some system of tax representing the pollution kerosene causes.
Saying that, has anyone tried to organise leaving the second biggest trading organisation lately?
The envisaged useful payload for aircraft such as this is very light; it’s essentially electronic equipment to transmit or reflect radio waves, or cameras that have already been lightweighted foir space applications.
Silvia: You should run down some numbers before being infuriated with the lack of passenger carrying airplanes powered by batteries. One thing is to fly a very light model, and another completely different to be able to lift hundreds of tons at practical transport speeds and with a high safety index. This is an Engineering site, not apolitical one, thus, perform some calculations at least!
Very good answer, friend!
Have you done the calculations that prove it is impossible or not feasible to carry heavy loads? I am a manufacturing engineer and I can perform the calculations on how to make an airplane or anything else. I am also a citizen of the world and I will demand from any profession to ensure that what they put in use does not do any damage. It is not politics, but professional code of ethics.
Speaking of heavy loads, fortunately many engineers have done the calculations and clean flying is not only possible, both technically and commercially, but is happening: http://flying-whales.com/en
Aviation is a contributer to ACC but is small compared with agriculture, cars or (I believe) shipping. Beating up aviation is a fun sport but the emissions per person km are low. Last time I checked they were lower than high speed trains (except in France where they use nice clean nuclear electricity for their trains).
I think we have a disconnect from the intent of the article which was to report on light aircraft that can remain aloft and on station for weeks at a time, not passenger transport. Completely separate issues. As to fuels, carbon emissions, etc., we already have the capability to produce sufficient fuels from algae within a land area one seventh the area of the State of Colorado.
The same can be done in the ocean if a sufficient investment were made to contain this algae farm in a perimeter (away from shipping lanes, please). Not only that, a 30% saving of fuel needed for container ships (and other shipping) is available by producing hydrogen on demand that improves fuel burn so that all the BTU value in the fuel goes to pushing the pistons, not creating soot. Have fun out there, lot of room in the world for improvement, just don’t starve anyone while having your fun.
Congratulations to the Airbus team on their achievement, but I would have thought that once such an ultra light aircraft reach the Stratosphere, with no cloud cover to limit the solar cells, that it would stay up there until some mechanical issue forced it to land. Did they give the reason for it landing ? It is a step in the right direction, but it seems to have taken a long time.
That’s true but unfortunately there’s no sunlight during the night when it must fly on batteries. The batteries obviously have a finite number of re-charge cycles.
Is our journey really necessary?
Paw paw air-freighted from Malaysia to Macclesfield or the many tons of legal ‘hard-copy’ paper traversing the oceans in both/all directions daily : electronic communication was supposed to give us the paper-less office and factory ? and surely there are a vast number of un-necessary journeys throughout the world, daily. I wonder how many are being made by important folk (such as academics and politicians) attending conferences to see how large the problem of pollution is!?
it’s not an “aircraft-come-satellite”, but an aircraft-cum-satellite. Check your latin. See the entry in Grammarist.com:
“The Latin loanword cum, originally a preposition meaning with, in English has come to mean plus or along with being. It usually takes the form [noun]-cum-[noun], with the two nouns denoting characteristics of a person or thing. It’s often used to describe an individual’s or thing’s contradictory or surprising characteristics—for example, “Jimmy is a hunter-cum-animal-activist.”