Airbus's new Zephyr aircraft makes 26-day record maiden flight

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.”