Thats the manned solar impulse which is due to take off again on another trial flight. Don't forget that the Zephyr will pass the two weeks in the air point later today, Friday the 23rd of July. It does not take a rocket scientist to work out that the man is probably the weak link in the Solar Impulse!!
No offence meant to a very skilled pilot no doubt, but when you here them saying things like engine up 3 RPM and down 3 RPM you realise an autopilot should be handling that sort of thing... http://www.solarimpulse.com/nightFlights/
You have to keep him alive and happy as well. I could'nt help looking at the sponsors watch and his flying helmet and thinking, crumbs theres some amount of payload just there!
Maybe I am just very jealous and would love to be flying that airframe, one thing the man does bring to the party is the ability to get the thing flown around the world and beat regulations for UAS.
Good luck to them, I bet there are spin-offs into the UAS world.
Now those that can really ought to raise a glass to our UAS team, the chaps from QinetiQ when the appointed hour comes and hope that it has a safe landing.
The count down is here
Comments
Take the recent oil spill - the bloviating about how this is deep, and you can't send "people" down there, when you realize that the differential pressures are in thousands of PSI, one should realize that if people were to be down there, they would just be manipulating very similar heavy equipment, but they would then be at risk, in need of a 10 minute break every 60 minutes, a full nights sleep, and 3 meals a day, etc...
I simply doubt that remote manipulators are inferior to "real people" in these situations.
We should embrace our remotely operated overlords.
True, this flight was only 14 days, and people have survived worse; but those 14 days were only to establish the ability to stay aloft - indefinitely. At indefinite deployment, the weight of food alone is a non-starter (never mind the mind-numbing existence).
Dont' forget a two person team set a world record flying the Voyager non-stop around the world in 9 plus days. They were miserable, yes, but sometimes pilots are "a necessary evil" in flying.
It should be noted that this flight will do more to enable UAS flights over non-militarized airspace than any other single flight and perhaps more than all other UAV flights to date. This flight demonstrates a flight which cannot essentially be performed by a pilot (fatigue, food and water requirements would prevent even a two-person team from existing on such a flight to say nothing of the misery.) - and a huge benefit - satellite services at low cost - think Sirius, Rural Internet, Mobile Internet, Sat Phones, Indoor GPS, Live TV broadcasts without the truck and wire, traffic reporting, news and police helis without the crashes, Indeed the range of services unleashed by cheap and near satellite access could be "The Next Big Thing" or the key to reemployment and the end of the current recession.
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