DISPATCHES FROM THE FRONT LINE OF AEROSPACE TECHNOLOGY
ZEPHYR DRONE FLIES FOR NEARLY A MONTH STRAIGHT
AIRBUS’S ZEPHYR SOLARPOWERED drone flew for 25 days straight during a test light over Yuma, Arizona beginning on July 11 this year. The light represented a record for aircraft endurance, breaking the previous 14-day record also set by a Zephyr back in 2015.
The long light has big implications for military surveillance. Unmanned aerial vehicles like the Zephyr could loiter over a low-intensity battlefield far longer than current drones can do. The latest high-endurance MQ-9 Reaper drone maxes out at 40 hours in the air.
The propeller-driven Zephyr belongs to a class of aircraft known as ‘high-altitude pseudo satellites’, or HAPs. Flying as high as 70,000ft for weeks or even months at a time, HAPs perform many of the same missions that low-orbiting satellites do.
‘The main HAP applications are in telecommunications and remote sensing, both civilian and military’, Flavio Araripe d’Oliveira, Francisco Cristovão Lourenço de Melo and Tessaleno Campos Devezas wrote in a 2016 paper.
Compared to comms satellites, HAPs have the advantages of lower latency and the ability to land for maintenance or reconfiguration,…
