jthomaslm

Thanks for sharing. Estimating air mass and solar irradiance are definitely interesting topics - I'll take a look at what you've put together!

Thanks, I've been training! ;)

Thanks!

Thanks, next stop is the stratosphere! :)

Thanks Lars - I have emailed you!

Our aim is to fly at higher altitudes than Solar Impulse/SkyDweller, which keeps us above the turbulent winds and cloud cover of the troposphere, and makes long endurance flight more reliable/less weather dependent. Our platform is also a lot smaller than SkyDweller, which helps keep costs much lower and opens some interesting new opportunities - for example, deploying lots of aircraft in a mesh network.

The Solar Impulse/SkyDweller lineage is very inspiring - what an amazing way to demonstrate how much you can do with solar power!

Thanks, wildfires inspired us to work on this technology, so we're excited to see it used in those applications too!

Thanks, it was a lot of fun!

Thanks - feel free to reach out if you have any lessons learned you think we should know about! Being a student of history is important for a project like this!

Absolutely, we think there are some really interesting use cases around imagery too - for exactly these reasons.

Thanks - appreciate the love!

Thanks so much, it's a lot of fun to work on.

Thanks for the website feedback - for the sake of clarity, our test flights with the sub-scale aircraft have all been at lower altitudes. The stratosphere is the next step and we plan to fly there next summer!

We haven’t put this together, but that’s a great idea!

Love the enthusiasm - it's definitely a very fun project to be working on!

Discussed a few of your questions elsewhere in the comments, but here are some thoughts on scaling laws:

Over-simplifying a bit for the sake of brevity: In general, for larger aircraft structural mass scales up more quickly than wing area (check out “indoor free flight models”). By using a span-loaded structure (i.e. having weight distributed along the wing span to match the way lift is spread over the wing) you can avoid some of these constraints and have an approximately constant structural mass fraction.

The aircraft is actually very quiet - it needs to be very aerodynamically efficient so it doesn't require much thrust. You can’t really hear it in flight, but I’m no audio engineer - so I don't know how useful microphones would be. Genuinely curious about this so if you have any pointers let me know!

Wow, very cool! I've watched plenty of races at the Nurburgring but never stopped to think about how I was receiving the video feeds! If you have any contacts there I'd love to speak to them.