Wishing success for this historic flight! "A plane powered only by the Sun has set off from San Francisco on the first leg of a bid to cross the US with no fuel. The Solar Impulse craft will stop in Phoenix, Dallas, St Louis, Washington DC and New York in the coming weeks. The team's plane has the same wingspan as an Airbus A340 but weighs only as much as an average car. It has already made a day-and-night flight lasting more than 26 hours, and the team aims to eventually circumnavigate the globe in 2015. The plane took off from Moffett Field on the edge of San Francisco Bay at 06:12 local time (13:12 GMT). It should take about 19 hours to complete the first leg of the American crossing to Phoenix. The craft's wings and stabiliser are covered with nearly 12,000 solar cells, which in daylight hours charge an array of lithium-ion batteries in gondolas that hang below the wing. Together, these provide power to the plane's four electric motors and allow flight in daylight and night conditions." http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22369680#http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22369680#
King Obama will be happy, knowing that his American-killing drones can fly 24/7. As an aerospace engineer the Mayor is confident that this technology will not have broad commercial applications, ie, we'll still need jet fuel and turbofans to deliver four M1-A1 tanks to the battlefield in a timely manner.
Oh! For......... Is there an "Obama fixation syndrome" in America? - - - Updated - - - Seems at present they are using fairly conventional solar panels - wonder how they will manage with the newer panels coming out? Edgar Rice Burroughs and his "sailing on light" in the Mars books - lols!!
im not fixated a bunch of people have pictures of their president on their undies and sleep with a plushy doll in said presidents likeness ....stop judging me
You would DEFINITELY never want to do that with any of our prime ministerial candidates - talk about ensuring a lonely and nightmare filled bedroom!!
There must be. How else could more than sixty million idiots vote to give that illegal alien a second term?
I am lucky enough to have seen this in action last week. I was waiting for the ferry to take me home, and saw it flying over the San Francisco bay. It was making slow circles between the Embarcadero and Treasure Island. I tried to take some photos, but with the white plane and light blue sky, there was not enough contrast for it to be visible. Was pretty cool though. The thing was totally silent.
I like nice engineering and this looks very very nice! As I said i doubt it would replace commercial aircraft but there are a lot of other things it COULD replace - especially out here in the "outback". It would be like riding in a controllable balloon - think of the tourism potential - especially for game spotting if it is that quiet!!
I also do not see any kind of passenger potential for this, it is just to slow. There were our usual 15 mph winds in the bay that day, and the thing could barely move against the wind. However, I do see other potential uses. Mostly in tourism-research. This would be a great way to say do wildlife counts, and do ground probing radar searches for geological features. Disaster recovery, search and rescue, I see a great many uses for this. However, carrying passengers and freight is not among them.
When any new invention comes along it is hard to see what may come further down the line. A British physicist once said something along the line that the steam locomotive will never be able to go faster than 50 mph as the man is not capable of travelling at such speeds. One of the chief executives of IBM, I think it was the CEO at the time, said that the world only had need for a few computers. I mean look at a computer, it's as big as a house, it takes copious amounts of power, it performs a few mathematical functions, albeit it performs them thousands of times with very high precision, and a lot quicker than manually using variables and formulas feed into it with punch cards. I mean it's not something that's ever going to be used in cars and watches or televisions, microwave ovens and mobile phones even if we were to invent them. Fischer Price "My Computer", what you talking about?
I keep seeing it as an interesting development for the freight industry, though it may take some time to mature the technology
Sorry, but this would be a complete failure as a freight carrier. No matter how much it matures. It has wings the size of an Airbus A340, flies at barely over 20 mph, and can barely carry it's pilot. It's max take-off weight is barely 900 pounds over it's maximum weight. Once you factor in it's speed and the requirements for maintaining a crew of 1 as it crawls along at 20 mph, this is one of the most inefficient ways to move 600 pounds that I have ever seen. Honestly, I think somebody on a bicycle would do a much better job as a "cargo hauler". Of course, I guess you could build an entire fleet of these, and use them to move the mail. More or less following the "infinite monkeys" concept.
Yes, but the Internal Combustion Engine had already been invented, mostly what had to be improved was the basic technology of the aircraft itself (come on, turning by wing warping?). Most of the initial advances in flight came fast, as designs were improved. After WWI, the only 3 major improvements were the radial engine, swept wings and jet propulsion. Technologically, almost anything possible now was possible in 1940. This time, there is nothing really "new". We have had large wingspan ultra-light aircraft for decades, as well as solar cells and batteries. Nothing is really earth-shattering in this, in design or implementation. This is just really the first time anybody has really tried to put it all together. There is simply not enough technology for this to push in the next decade, or several decades. If this is going to be used for hauling cargo, they are gonna have to dump the idea of a winged aircraft, and go to something lighter then air, like a blimp or dirigible. Then it might actually make a decent cargo lifter.
Figures you'd make it political. I don't believe the government has anything to do with it; rather it is a commercial venture.
And this is pretty much where I see this technology going. It wont be powering sleek 747 cargo jets. These will be big fat airborne whales lumbering along at 100 mph
Not hardly! The top speed of a blimp is only around 30 mph. Their soft airframe prevents them from being any faster. Sure they can lift a lot of weight per pound of aircraft, but it is still not all that much. And while zeppelins can travel faster (around 80 mph), their rigid airframe takes up a lot of their lifting power, and they have very little left over for cargo. And both are severely hampered by weather. If it was really feasible for them to be used in this way, it would have already been done. Sure, it is a romantic notion, but it is not practical. This is not even rocket science, the physics and capabilities of these aircraft have been known for almost 100 years now. Simply a new propulsion system will not make them workable in any real manner other then as a novelty.
That's the way I see it too. We can't know the future developments that will be made in both PV and battery technology. Many thought it would be impossible for a solar plane to ever fly overnight, yet that has now been done.
Yeah, I never figured out why everyone made such a big deal out of them. That is like celebrating the first explorer to go into Africa. He probably died from some snake bite or malaria of was eaten by some big animal right away but hey, he made it 100 feet. The person that should receive the most credit is Amelia Erhardt because she was played by Amy Adams in Night at the Museum 2 and she is smoking.
