Solar-Powered Airplane Completes First International Flight 211
liqs8143 writes "Solar Impulse, a fully solar-powered airplane, has completed its first international solar-powered flight. After a flight lasting 12 hours 59 minutes at an altitude of 12,400 feet, using no fuel and propelled by solar energy alone, Solar Impulse HB-SIA landed safely in Brussels, Switzerland. After the landing, company co-founder Bertrand Piccard said, 'Our goal is to create a revolution in the minds of the people . . . to promote solar energies — not necessarily a revolution in aviation.' Compared with 2003, energy efficiency has increased from 16 to 22 percent. And the cells are now half as thick. The project has a total cost of $88 million, which is funded by mostly-Swiss partners and public donations."
Brussels, Switzerland, eh? (Score:2, Insightful)
That would be _to_ Brussels, _from_ Switzerland, I'm guessing.
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Snobbery over American ignorance of geography always amuses me. The fact of the matter is that most people's knowledge of geography is limited to their own country and a few other countries which are important on the international stage. Nearly everyone could find India on a map, but only very few could do the same for, say, Lithuania or Azerbaijan.
In other words, don't expect the average person to know the geography of unimportant countries, like Belgium.
I'm American, yet I somehow am capable of understanding that Brussels isn't in Switzerland, just as many Europeans are capable of understanding that Miami isn't in New York.
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Miami is too easy, it's well known for its sun & beaches. Same with NYC, LA, San Fran, Seattle, Houston.
As a native of Seattle, the LAST thing I'd think Seattle is known for is sun and beaches! Heck, I usually have to specify the State, right near Vancouver BC (not Vancouver, WA) to make people in Europe and Asia realize I'm not from Washington DC.
Geography (Score:2)
So when i say I'm going from Washington to Denver by road and it takes less than 4 hours.
Or
I'm going from London to Paris by road and it takes less than an hour.
What countries am I in?
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Miami is too easy, it's well known for its sun & beaches. Same with NYC, LA, San Fran, Seattle, Houston.
And Brussels is the capital of the EU. In terms of political influence, it ranks up there with Washington DC, Beijing, and Moscow. Of all of the cities in Europe that you might have an excuse for not knowing about, Brussels is near the bottom of the list.
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Awesome Geography ! (Score:4, Funny)
Solar Impulse HB-SIA landed safely in Brussels, Switzerland. ... never knew Brussels was part of Switzerland ...O wait ... guess I should go hand in my Belgian passport and go request a Swiss one ....
Damn
Awesome Geography ./ !
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it's obviously a subtle freudian slip. The hardon collider is about in Geneva and Brussels has the chocolate.
Re:Awesome Geography ! (Score:5, Funny)
Brussels is in Switzerland, for very large values of Switzerland.
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From a European POV.
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Yeah. The achievement became considerably less impressive when they relocated the source city to the destination country. They just flew the solar-powered airplane out of city limits.
The real achievement wasn't the airplane. It was solving the cultural/political tension in Brussels by physically relocating it to a new country (nearly 700 km distant and 400 meters in elevation). (Yes, I'm American, but I figured I'd show a little respect to the continent involved and use metric distances.)
Really, folks, cong
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True, but most airports are termed by the biggest city they are associated with. It's only when you want to be accurate you term the area the airport is really in. You don't want to start confusing the people that are coming from outside of the country.
Heck even Charleroi is termed the second airport of Brussels by some.
Video of landing not playing well (Score:2)
Beat them (Score:4, Insightful)
Not Impressed (Score:2, Informative)
Brussels is in Belgium / Belge (Score:2)
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The article is posted on a non-American web site.
It is quite amazing how the various Europeans who post on this site manage to embarrass themselves so frequently.
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Your statement would be interessting, if it had anything to do with reality.
Yes, the article was posted on a non-American website.
But guess what: The article nowhere says that Brussels is in Switzerland.
So this was added by the editor here at ./ or by the person submitting the story. Either of whom are most probably American.
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Click on the author's name. You will find yourself on a Pakistani web site.
There is no evidence that the author is American.
Your turn Europe.
Payerne (SZ) via Nancy (FR) to Brussels (BE) (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Payerne (SZ) via Nancy (FR) to Brussels (BE) (Score:4, Informative)
SZ? [wikipedia.org] Wow, Swaziland to Belgium is quite a hike.
And yet if you remove the superfluous punctuation [wikipedia.org] from your Wikipedia search you find that SZ is the "the NATO country code for Switzerland". Swaziland would then be WZ in that system.
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Yeah, and we all live by NATO codes here on the continent. Right?
I would sooner point to the ISO3166 standard for country codes. There, Switzerland is still CH.
Having said that, ISO3166 doesn't quite match the vehicle codes used on the road.
I tend to look at the license plates on cars, where CH is Switzerland, but France would be F and Belgium would be B.
Here is a list of both the vehicle codes and the ISO3166 codes:
http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landcodes_voor_voertuigen [wikipedia.org]
Oh, and by the way: Swaziland is SD re
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By the way, its because Switzerland is a confederacy of Helvetians (Confoederatio Helvetica) that they're CH.
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Yeah, and we all live by NATO codes here on the continent. Right?
Actually, I don't care what you personally use as I am not making any advocacy statements here regarding country codes. Suffice it to say that the original poster does use that particular system, and they were not incorrect to do so (as the Anonymous Coward who responded had assumed).
You seem to be taking such a trivial matter rather personally. Your animosity towards NATO should not dictate how other people must express themselves.
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I don't harbour any animosity towards NATO. I was just indicating that citing NATO codes while everyone I know in the civilized world uses the ISO standard or the Vehicle codes.
The reaction that said "superfluous punctuation" is a display of being a besserwisser. I felt it necessary to argue against a besserwisser. It's what I do. I takes one to know one, you see. ;)
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I don't harbour any animosity towards NATO. I was just indicating that citing NATO codes while everyone I know in the civilized world uses the ISO standard or the Vehicle codes.
I guess it was the "NATO can kiss my ass" that gave the impression of animosity, but it is no big drama. I have seen SZ used for Switzerland before. A simple Google search will bring up many examples. But I do not know why anybody uses any codes to signify country names, let alone why they would choose one standard over another. It seems that it would save more time for people to use the full country names than to cause the problems that this example has demonstrated.
The reaction that said "superfluous punctuation" is a display of being a besserwisser.
It is interesting that you would focus o
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We should use the latin names for these former roman provinces
Brussels, Switzerland? (Score:4, Funny)
I am deeply sorry, but I have to agree with TheNAM666 here. This does look like a typical American write-up. Just like that time a security lady at an airport in the US was questioning me about why my Dutch passport was made in Switzerland. It got made at the consulate in Stockholm. Or that time when the Israeli border check said the same damn thing.
I have found that both Americans and Israelis have displayed the most spectacular levels of ignorance about the world outside of their own country. More so than other travelers and people I've met in my life. That's not to say all Americans and Israelis are stupid, far from it. It's just that the ratio of numbnuts to decent conversationalists is significantly higher.
Coolest example ever was when Dutch customs at Schiphol airport were looking for something because they were asking every passenger that passed through a certain spot where they just arrived from. They put the question in Dutch first. An American lady in front of me looked at the customs officer and in reply to his "Pardon Mevrouw, waar komt uw vlucht vandaan?" she barked an irritated "I don't speak German".
He smiled, inclined his head and replied "That's alright, madam. Neither do I."
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I must apologize for the incident at the border crossing in Israel. Though most of the world seems unaware of it, our resources are very strained, and the education system is unfortunately rather poor in many areas. In contrast to the United States, I believe we are relatively aware of it, and would like to change it.
If that happened at an airport security check, and was not a ploy used to test you, it should be a reason for dismissal of the security agent. Please post again if it did.
The incident
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I must apologize for the incident at the border crossing in Israel. Though most of the world seems unaware of it, our resources are very strained, and the education system is unfortunately rather poor in many areas. In contrast to the United States, I believe we are relatively aware of it, and would like to change it.
If that happened at an airport security check, and was not a ploy used to test you, it should be a reason for dismissal of the security agent. Please post again if it did.
Really? I think it's a genuine question. Most passports are issues in the home country, so it's worth a follow up question. My last trip through TLV had an hour-long interrogation, involving me getting emails out and even running up eclipse. They seemed shocked that I'd been to Greece as well, an unusual location for us brits to go.
I'm dreading my next trip through TLV, as I'll have been to Gaza, which is bound to bring up questions.
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In Holland you can get a second "clean" passport. All I needed to obtain one is a statement from my employer that I need to visit "conflicting countries" professionally.
That way, you can have all the Israeli stamps (and US, whatnot) in one passport, while you have a second passport that needs replacing every two years for the Arabic nations, Russia and all of those.
That shaves a lot off of the interrogations, so if you are eligible for a similar thing in the United Kingdom I would wholeheartedly recommend y
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Oh, you want to apologize for incidents at Israel's borders? In that case you can keep 'm coming, buddy!
I lived in Israel for three years. And as a very frequent traveler for both business and for the purpose of visiting my family in the Netherlands, I have to say it was a good lesson in racism. I have never had to deal with a more rude and racist set of security people in my life. I have found the border people more courteous in any country I've been to, including Bahrain, Dubai, South Africa, the US and p
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Given your clarification, it sounds like the security personnel did what they were trained to do, which is use whatever means necessary to assess whether you are who you say you are, or if you are intent on killing someone or the like.
All it takes is one dying body in front of you, when it could have been prevented, to drive this point home in a concrete manner. Trust me.
Since I am not orthodox by far, the El Al and Tel Aviv security folks will usually give me a good and thorough questioning, right
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While I mostly agree with your post, I'd like to say that Dutch and German are pretty similar. It might hurt your pride, but they're basically the same language with a slightly different grammar and pronunciation.
I can speak 5 languages, but I'm really not sure I could tell the difference between Swedish and Danish, or even Japanase/Korean/Chinese, especially if you take different accents and pronunciations into account.
If you think I'm a numbnut, well, you know where you can shove your West Germanic langua
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I can speak 5 languages, but I'm really not sure I could tell the difference between Swedish and Danish
I speak maybe 2.5 languages, and I am sure: I certainly couldn't tell the difference. But if someone at a Danish airport addresses me in a scandinavian-sounding language I'm not going to assume it's Swedish. Which is the equivalent of what happened here.
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This was about a question asked by a Dutch customs official when arriving in The Netherlands.
Common sense dictates that this person would be asking the question in Dutch, not German. And apparently repeated in English afterwards.
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The Dutch language is indeed similar to German, but it's also similar to English. To me it looks like a cross between the two. I'm not a linguist however.
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Well, the history of English is such that local tribesmen got their arses invaded by Romans, Scandinavians and Germanic folk, so English is actually a cross breed of the Roman, Germanic and Nordic languages with some Gaelic thrown in for good measure.
Sort of.
Not that Dutch is "pure" because there's plenty of Roman/Hellenistic influences, as well as Arabic. Our hard "G" sound comes from the Spanish (think José). The Spanish got that "G" from the Moors who ruled the peninsula for close to 700 years. So t
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BlackPig opineth:
>While I mostly agree with your post, I'd like to say that Dutch and German are pretty similar.
>It might hurt your pride, but they're basically the same language with a slightly different grammar and pronunciation.
So are English, Welsh, Dutch, and Danish. They're all Western Germanics. Virtually indistinguishable.
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Well, I happen to speak Swedish, German, Dutch, English, Norwegian and a bit of French. You are right in that anyone with a Nordic/Germanic background has a relatively easy time picking up the rest of 'm, and French being a Roman language has always posed me with a bigger challenge.
Having said that, Danish is just too weird. In writing it looks just like Norwegian, but when these people open their mouths the sounds that emanate from them are just indescribably odd and at odds with the written form.
The Norwe
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Mein Darwin im Himmel, you make me wish I had MOD points. +Funny.
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I'd blame the evening news more than anything. Human interest stories like firemen getting a cat out of the tree appear often, and we're talki
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I wish the general consensus here in the US were to be more interested and respectful of our foreign friends (and enemies for that matter). There are those of us who know that Stockholm is actually in Sweden, and that they speak Dutch in the Netherlands. It saddens me because I know people here in the US who think that any language other than English is just a waste of time, and effort. I have actually been chastised by a woman for being fond of Spanish, and languages in general. Not everyone here is so
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Sweden would be something like "shwaedia" while Switzerland is "Schweitz"-like in pronunciation. Probably because of Yiddish speakers, this adoption of the word.
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Ah, you're one of these folks who are saying that:
1) The US had nothing to do with the creation of the socio-economic circumstances of post-WWI Germany, thus leading to WWII
2) The UK, Norway, Australia, Canada and the resistance movements all across Europe had nothing to do with the demise of the third Reich.
Nice. Very nice.
Although it would have been a funny comeback. ;)
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Granted. Absolutely. There are astoundingly ignorant jackasses in most corners of the world, including Holland.
All you need to do is go to a camping site in the South of France or Spain, and you'll witness plenty of Holland's finest. Including the potatoes they seem to insist on lugging around to foreign countries.
Here's how to make flight work (Score:2)
Aircraft require more high density energy than any other thing humans do (besides spacecraft). Getting off the ground with any significant amount of cargo and traveling at a useful speed of several hundred knots requires many gigajoules of energy. Only fossil fuels have that kind of energy density and power output : even nuclear is too darn heavy compared to jet fuel.
In the long run, eventually we'll run out of recoverable fossil fuel. There'll still be plenty of it in the ground, but the energy cost to
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And power output density. A fueled nuclear reactor has enormous amounts of energy stored in it, but the reactor can only safely release a small amount of energy at a time. Thus, the power developed is low relative to the weight of the reactor + turbines + shielding + safety equipment. That's just fine for land based, or even for a ship or submarine, but a serious problem for an aircraft.
Yes, there were experimental nuclear engines being developed for a robot bomber. The way they got around the shielding
No mention of where it flew from... (Score:2)
fake video (Score:2)
The video is a fake. No way is Switzerland that flat.
Brussels, Switzerland? (Score:2)
Switzerland is not a member of the EU so it does not make sense to move the de-facto capitol of said union there. Why not just keep it to Brussels, Belgium instead?
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Last time I checked (Score:2)
A revoluton in Aviation? Hah! (Score:2)
In 13 hours they only went 660 km? Thats not likely to be a practical alternative to jet powered planes. And its not like they can keep going much longer than that, solar power is not so good at night.
It's a sailplane (Score:2)
My main issue with Solar Impulse is that it is not a solar powered aircraft but a sailplane with a solar powered assist. It uses stored electricity to get to altitude then uses standard sailplane techniques to get where it is going. You may call thermals and ridge lift (lift crated by wind being pushed up hill) solar power but it has nothing to do with solar panels. They probably use electricity to move from one area of lift to another but it is not the main source of energy. Considering that the sailplane
Brussels in Swiss ? Right! (Score:2)
I've always knew there was something cheesy about Brussel-Halle-Vilvoorde!
I'm going to get my Swiss-Belgian passport right now!
Brussels, Switzerland? (Score:2)
I thought the Swiss were always neutral, when did they invade Belgium?
While everyone is focused on the middle east, the Swiss are taking over Europe!
Neat but what's the breakthrough? (Score:2)
IAAP but IANAAE (I Am a Pilot but I Am Not an Aeronautical Engineer)
Other than a 'hey, that's cool' factor, I don't get what the big deal here is. There's not a lot of information in the article or the video, but the suggestion is that this is some kind of breakthrough in powered flight.
A little bit of background: Even a small, single-engine airplane will burn 6-8 gallons of aviation gas per hour, and AVGAS is about $6/gallon (in the US - probably even more in Europe), and this is one of several reasons why
Re:'International' Flight? (Score:4, Informative)
Switzerland to Belgium. So it wasn't just a hop across an adjacent border. And, as the summary says, they were in the air for almost 13 hours.
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If they were moving 1cm per minute (spending all its energy just staying up), then they could have only traveled 7.8m. Time doesn't mean much.
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If they had a helicopter that hovered for 13 hours at such a low speed it would be even more impressive.
What, like a party balloon?
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Hot air balloons fly too "using no fuel" and I'm sure they could be propelled forward using solar too.
Flight distance from Switzerland to Belgium is only 320 miles (487 km) [travelmath.com]. That's only 26 mph (40 kph). A solar powered car is over twice as fast. [newscientist.com]
At an average speed of 26 mph this isn't an airplane, it's a glider, as you can see from this extremely slow speed take-off [youtube.com]
The $94 million wasted on this [fastcompany.com] would have been better spent on improving solar powered cars ra
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Re:'International' Flight? (Score:4, Insightful)
Hot air balloons don't generate lift using aerofoils, they float using a large bag of hot lighter-than-the-surrounding air, and they use large propane burners to keep that bag's contents warm - so they do use fuel. They also only have gross control - up and down. Their direction of travel is largely subject to prevailing winds.
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But that's now - I imagine that solar aircraft will become significantly cheaper in the fut
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I doubt the flow of air at 1 cm / min (3.7 10^-4 MPH) would create the lift neede
Might be just a lot of hot air blowing from Brussels.
Apparently its heaven for glider pilots.
Re:'International' Flight? (Score:4, Funny)
So it went through Switzerland, France, and Belgium?
Still not that impressive; I'm working on a boomerang capable of traveling across four US states, which I plan to test in New Mexico.
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Point ---> x
You ---> x
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why not just use a whole field full of the things on the ground to produce the energy, and load it onto the plane in the form of (say) hydrogen?
You're pretty much right, this is largely a publicity stunt. No reasonably sized aircraft would be able to replenish a significant portion of its energy budget from the sunlight that lands on its body.
However, there is one niche where a solar powered aircraft would make sense -- lightweight drones that are meant run autonomously and stay up in the air for months or years at a time. For them, being able to "refuel" every day without landing anywhere would be a big plus.
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I wonder, if you could capture 80% of the solar energy that hit an aircraft the size of something like Boeing's BWB concept (say roughly an equilateral triangle with the length of an A380's wingspan), how much energy would that be?
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> I find it very unlikely that it'll ever be efficient to lug solar cells around on a plane - not to say that there won't be airliners run from solar power, just that generating that power onboard, in real time, seems ridiculously wasteful.
I used to think so, but I have kind of changed my mind. There are a number of points in favour of adding solar cells:
a) If you can integrate them into the wing surface, the impact should be minimal.
b) Planes fly above the clouds, so you get more sunshine hours and hig
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In the event we run really low on petroleum what would be more common is generating fuel on the ground (hydrocarbons from biofuel, solar, nuclear or whatever) and then filling up a conventional jet plane with it. That way passenger planes can still travel at 900+kph.
Solar powered planes on the other hand might be useful as drones or "satellites".
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You seem to be woefully ignorant in the scale of what you propose. This aircraft has a wing area of some 200m^2, or roughly that of an old 757. With that wing area, allowing for reduced dispersion in the atmosphere, and high efficiency commercially available cells, you might expect as high as 50kW peak generating capacity. For 450knot+ flight speed, you're looking to replace two turbofans with an output likely somewhere around 50MW each. Under the best conditions, you're three whole orders of magnitude
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The biggest problem I can see with getting up to jet speeds with an electric vehicle is the method of propulsion. How can you propel an e-plane aside from using a conventional prop? Perhaps the ducted fan could eventually replace the turbo prop.
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They're both very hard, bordering on impossible, problems. Care to share an electric thruster capable of propelling an airliner at 1000kph?
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Switzerland to Belgium. So it wasn't just a hop across an adjacent border. And, as the summary says, they were in the air for almost 13 hours.
Three hundred miles is what someone says further down the thread. Not far by standards of the northern half of the western hemisphere. So again, the headline shouldn't be pimping the international aspect, rather the time aspect (which IS impressive).
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To give you an idea how fast that was. The Pony Express could do the three hundred miles in less time, at a cost of far less than 88 Million $.I know gliders that have traversed the Appalachia mountains in single day, a distance that is far greater. I still think the pedal powered flight from England to France is more impressive.
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Speaking of pedal power, I wonder how that human helicopter did the other day. Local news said the first flight didn't work, but a second one was scheduled.
2x further than Solar Challenger (Score:2)
The Solar Challenger did a 262km international flight from England to France in 1981. Given that the Solar Impulse has a max speed of 50km/h (from TFA) and was in the air almost 13 hours, that suggests a flight in the neighborhood of 600km. Not bad but then, one would expect some progress after 30 years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Challenger [wikipedia.org]
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No no – it landed in Brussels in Switzerland. Glad to see that the US version of geography is alive and well.
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The summary isn't very clear about the flight path. Clearly, this is the work of 'Wrong Way' Corrigan [wikipedia.org].
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I actually did RTFA, and none of the articles mention the embarkation point. They mention mission control in Payerne, and that the plane went over the Jura mountains, and that the plane landed in Brussels, but never states where it took off from.
The summary isn't good (Brussels Switzerland?), but the articles suck.
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The summary isn't good (Brussels Switzerland?), but the articles suck.
Hrm, Slashdot isn't raising its standards to meet the rest of the world, the rest of the world is lowering theirs to meet slashdot...
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To introduce errors that we can all laugh at, of course! Daily lulz!
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The 'unshorten' [unshorten.com] site saved me from your troll, but there is a phenomenon I just discovered has a name, which sounds very trollish, called 'cloud suck' [mashpedia.com]. It can keep you aloft for a very long time and even kill you if it carries you too high. Hang gliders beware! And slashdotters beware of almost everybody with a UID over 2000000...
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Just that little detail about no light over one pole or the other...
Nah, if you fly in the Spring or Fall you'll get some light over both... I'd say the real issue with circumnavigating North-South is that you don't get to take advantage of air currents.
Also, when you get near the bottom you'll fall off!