Haipai's Blog

On Wednesday, a solar-powered airplane succesfully completed its maiden flight of around an hour and twenty seven minutes at an altitude of nearly 4,000 feet. An impressive achievement in the field of aviation.

This propeller plane, the Solar Impulse, had taken off from Payerne airfield in Switzerland piloted by a German test pilot Markus Scherdel. While this is a prototype, its wings are still full of 12,000 solar cells, the airplane weighs no more than 3,600 pounds and its wings are no more than 230 feet long.

It contains high-performance batteries which effectively conserves the power made from the 12,000 solar cells at night so it can continuously fly until daytime. It is also equipped with four electric motors. It has a quirky design to it, the wingspan is immense for such a small body and weight but that in itself is also an achievement. The cockpit holds a single pilot.

This airplane was made so it can fly ‘normally’ like other planes we see at airports except it travels without any fuel and doesn’t even produce emissions that can contribute to climate change.

The Solar Impulse had taken six years to build, its progress is impressive as the plane had only flew 3 feet above the ground and only traveled for little over a thousand feet only four to five months ago.

The flight had gone successfully without any problems. The budget for the project of making a Solar Impulse was 94 million USD or 100 million Swiss francs.

The project’s next step is to crate another version of the Solar Impulse so it can fly around the world using its solar cells and can possibly achieve the altitude of 28,000 feet and a speed goal of 43 miles per hour which in comparison to the airplanes that are not solar-powered and has emissions is “merely nothing”.

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This entry was posted on 星期五, 四月 9th, 2010 at 7:27 上午 and is filed under Global. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.