QinetiQ's Zephyr breaks flight time record for unmanned aircraft
The Zephyr aircraft flies purely by solar power.
(Credit: QinetiQ)
After 16 days, the Olympics concluded with 43 world records being broken. However, there's now another record that's no less exciting.
QinetiQ claimed Sunday that its propeller-driven aircraft called Zephyr flew for 83 hours and 37 minutes nonstop, more than doubling the official world record set by Northrop Grumman's Global Hawk in 2001.
The Zephyr is much different from the Global Hawk, which is about the size of a fighter and requires a runway for taking off and landing.
Zephyr, on the other hand, is an ultra-lightweight carbon-fiber aircraft that weighs less than 70 pounds and is designed to launch by hand. The little aircraft flies on solar power generated by amorphous silicon arrays covering the aircraft's paper-thin wings. It's powered day and night by lithium sulfur batteries that are recharged during the day using solar power.
QinnetiQ claims that last year, Zephyr also managed to stay up in the air for 54 hours on another flight.
However, both the Zephyr's reported flight times didn't meet all criteria laid down by The World Air Sports Federation--the governing body for air sports and aeronautical world records--and will probably remain unofficial.
Nonetheless, Zephyr's impressive fight time opens up a lot of potential for the aircraft the fields of earth observation and communications relay.
(Via Associated Press)
Dong Ngo is a CNET editor who covers networking and network storage, and writes about anything else he finds interesting. You can also listen to his podcast at insidecnetlabs.cnet.com. E-mail Dong. 
Becides, I'm not even sure that you're right about the word, that aircraft is a a collective noun. If I own a byplane am I not allowed to say "I onwe an aircraft." ?
Anyway, the real point is that they ARE speaking in collective terms.
Christopher D. Osborn
fipher.blogspot.com
just shut up
Aircraft is singular and plural, the usage is valid.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/aircraft
- by mrgardon August 25, 2008 5:53 AM PDT
- Cool but more detail please. Length? Width? Battery size, solar panel size? Anyone looking to scale it up? Oh... how fast does it fly?
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