Bah!
So, you crap out of the window?
After 12 years of research and testing, the Swiss engineering team Solar Impulse has unveiled the craft that will take a round-the-world- trip powered solely by photovoltaic power cells. Solar Impulse 2 Coming soon to a skyline near you "A vision counts for nothing unless it is backed up by action," said Bertrand Piccard, …
FYI... since the aircraft appears to be Swiss registered, and for the majority of the flight will not be in Chinese or Russian airspace, altitude would be specified in feet, not meters. And if you want to use MPH, that further suggests that feet are the appropriate unit. So what the aircraft will be doing is climbing to around 26,000ft (FL260) during the day, and descending to around 5,000ft at night.
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That would technically be a case of : Resistentialism: The seemingly spiteful behavior shown by inanimate objects.
I am wondering, given the minimal payload; what happens if the plane has to ditch in the sea, is there space and load capacity for a life raft or an airbed or is it down to inflating a packet of condoms in an emergency?
https://mapsengine.google.com/map/edit?mid=zqS42va89qTY.kI9RV8qDLf7o
At no point does the route touch the Southern Hemisphere. I detect not-so-subtle 'Northism' here.
That aside, it does make sense to stay out of the South, since that half of the globe won't be getting a lot of sun during the northern summer. Obviously this implies the next big challenge: The Southern Around the World Solar Flight! Much harder, with all those nasty great ocean spans to cover.
I wonder if they have a chase boat? It would have to be a hydrofoil to keep up tho.
I'd imagine it's because they don't want to take something that delicate through the inter tropical convergence zone (ITCZ). That's a more or less permanent line of thunderstorms around the equator, there's a degree of modification with time of year and land mass but either way the massive updrafts can push planes way above their operating limits, Flight of the Mew Gull by Alex Henshaw gives a vivid account of flying through it at night.
Given that a proper one-CPU autopilot capable of long and complex missions can already be found on sub-1kg drones, I fail to see why a triplet-set of the same hasn't been installed.
The pilot only needs waking up if the autopilots disagree or have confusing/missing data (pitot frozen, GPS fix jump etc).
I agree. Seems silly they are bothering with a pilot at all really.
But certainly an ardupilot for 30 quid is more than capable of flying this (it doesn't care what size it is - and control surfaces are all the same).
Does add an interesting question or maybe a next project for lester ?
- build a small 'drone' (rc plane size) fixed wing, which has sufficient solar cells to fly indefinately - fully autonomous with ardupilot, etc: and let it take off and fly around the world. GSM where available can let it inform us of its location and send the odd picture. Be a great project.
OK... not strictly legal... but if it flew at around 10k feetish, it's unlikely to be spotted. It won't appear on radar because of size, and is no more a risk to aviation than a bird strike....
It isn't an issue of 'bothering' with a pilot. It's an issue of using machines appropriately. As a guy who designs and builds machines of dizzying complexity I feel I am somewhat of an authority on the philosophies of mans use of machines.
Ultimately, the only thing man is actually capable of doing that is any different than any other animal is our ability to learn new things and combine that information with other information to drive the discovery of still more new information. Everything, from courting/dating instead of mating/raping all the way to standardized systems of trade and the laws that make it impossible for me to buy Antarctica are no more than the sum of decisions we, Man, have made based on previously known, or hypothesized, information about and the outcome of those decisions will be what we base future decisions on.
With that as our assumption it is a gross misuse of our abilities to build a machine to accomplish a feat that serves no purpose beyond removing the Human element as a requirement in accomplishing the feat. Machines, used appropriately, allow us to eliminate dangerous, difficult or menial tasks so that we can better focus our efforts meeting our purpose.
Of course - if 'as light as' is the linguistic equivalent of 'to the power of -1'. In this context, the 'three times' becomes 'three times to the power -1' or 'one third' in English. The correct inverse of 'light' is 'heavy' therefore:
'Three times as light as' == 'One third as heavy as'. QED.
This is the same lack of understanding about fractions as using multiples of 100%. I.e. 300% to mean 3x, probably because 300 is so much more impressive than 3. I believe this happens because English graduates don't understand that '300%' literally means '300 hundredths'.
I blame the government.
".... or will the batteries be precharged...."
Only enough charge is added to lift off and get up to the initial 8000m or so. The reason the aircraft starts its slow descent at sunset, is due to the increased power required to keep aloft the weight of all the excess energy collected during the day. /Stephen_Fry
Even if it can't be done, there's still no reason to not try and do it anyway.
The reason being is that the small steps may be possible, even if the end target is impossible. I don't think this trip would be possible without engines of 94% efficiency. They have them now, but they didn't at the start. Meaning they started on an impossible task in the first place.
Haha, really loose logic that, but I think you know what I mean.