The SolarStratos prototype electric aircraft made its maiden voyage Friday morning with test pilot Damian Hischier at the controls. Rapahel Domjan, the project’s founder, hopes the 81-foot wide, 1,000-pound plane will ultimately climb as high as 75,000 feet with pilots wearing pressurized space suits. The cabin itself will not be pressurized. In addition to its benefit as a technology demonstration, the SolarStratos, if successful, with be used to make atmospheric measurements in regions of the atmosphere that are out of reach to all but extremely high-performance military aircraft.
Although solar powered, the tandem two-seater is not designed to fly indefinitely. The photovoltaic cells on the horizontal surfaces of the aircraft will provide power to run the single electric motor, but carrying large enough batteries to fly overnight would make the plane too heavy to achieve the project’s lofty service ceiling ambitions. At peak motor output, the small 20-kWh lithium-ion battery pack would be discharged in less than an hour.
The team’s next goal is to get Domjan and his copilot, Thierry Plojoux, checked out on the plane so they can take it on the road for a public demonstration in Quebec next month.
