Some more aviation news for your edification. The British-built Zephyr is a solar-powered, unmanned aircraft that just flew for two weeks over the Arizona desert. That’s two straight weeks, mind you. It’s a triumph of engineering!
The aircraft, created by the impossible-to-pronounce Qinetiq, was created with the military in mind. The idea is that you launch one of these aircraft over a battlefield and can spend several days in a row doing nothing but collecting intelligence from the safety of the skies. That, and no pilots’ lives are at stake. Granted, since there’s no human inside the cockpit that could make commanders more apt to deploy it in less-than-safe conditions, but that’s a concern for another day.
The two-week flight broke several records. The previous continuous flight record, set way back in 1986, was a little more than nine days in the air. Consider that record smashed.
The only problem with the aircraft seems to be that, well, what if you’re fighting a war at high latitudes? Not a lot of light there as compared to the zones of the tropics.
Surely I’m not the only person who find the idea of green warfare a little silly, at least on the surface?