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Solar Impulse 2, a fully electric plane, has landed in California after its team spent months fixing a problem with overheated batteries:
An experimental plane flying around the world without a single drop of fuel landed in California after a two-and-a-half day flight across the Pacific. Piloted by Swiss explorer and psychiatrist Bertrand Piccard, Solar Impulse 2 touched down in Mountain View just before midnight (3 a.m. ET). "It's a new era. It's not science fiction. It's today," Piccard told CNN from California after his successful voyage. "It exists and clean technologies can do the impossible."
While Borschberg set a new record for the solo flight, clocking in at 117 hours and 52 minutes, a chain of events caused the batteries to overheat. It was only after he landed that the team discovered how bad the damage was. "We made a mistake with our batteries," Piccard said after the plane touched down in July. "It was a human mistake." And a mistake that took more than nine months to fix. Fast forward to this spring, and the Solar Impulse 2 has new batteries, a new cooling system that can be manually operated by the pilot, and $20 million in fresh funding to keep the mission up and running.
[...] After several stops in the United States, the pilots hope to cross the Atlantic Ocean, and then Europe or northern Africa. They plan to return to the Middle East by late summer, completing a 35,000-kilometer (27,000-mile) trip around the world.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Monday April 25 2016, @10:13PM
But what are you going to do with an indefinitely aloft drone that's bigger than a jumbo jet, can't hold a constant altitude, can't carry any passengers (or ordinance,) and can't fly as high as -- for example -- a Project Loon balloon? Too big for military or surveillance, too slow and low capacity for transport or delivery, probably too difficult to get through the red tape (due to size and altitude) for infrastructure and it can't maintain altitude for optimal strength/coverage anyway. And even if you get it working, you'd need a hell of a runway to launch the things...
Of course solar and battery tech will improve, so maybe they can make it a bit smaller or more powerful, but it still seems like you'd be better off with a blimp. Just strap a quadcopter to a weather balloon...