July 07, 2010
Payerne: A solar powered experimental aircraft is making a round the clock test flight. The target is to check that the plane can fly in darkness using the solar cells on its wings to generate enough power to stay in the air for 24 hours.
The plane took off from a Swiss airbase to make history by flying round the clock. The HB-SIA plane has the weight of a family car but the wingspan of a big airliner.
Pilot Andre Borschberg said when he entered the cockpit at an airfield in Payerne, in the west Switzerland, “For seven years now, the whole team has been passionately working to achieve this first decisive step of the project.”
By the late Wednesday he takes the aircraft to an altitude of 27,900ft, when the sun’s rays stop being strong enough to supply the solar cells with energy. Then the plane start a slow descent using energy stored in its batteries until sunrise.
The team said in a statement that, “The big question is whether the pilot can make efficient use of the battery energy to fly throughout the night. If this mission is successful, it will be the longest and highest flight ever made by a solar plane.”
“This should be a great day of all goes well, It’s clear that this is something that is completely different at least for aviation, but it’s also something completely different to what has existed in our society,” said team chief Bertrand Piccard. “The goal is to take to the air with no fuel.
The goal is to show that we can be much more independent from fossil energy than people usually think.” He added.
Mr. Borschberg and Mr. Piccard have worked on the project for seven years. Both want to prove that solar power has a practical future in aviation and many more, generally in powering society at large. The group decides to use this in two years time to make first manned transatlantic solar flight, followed in 2013.
