New Ways For Planes to Fly : Kathika Travel Website

By Amanda Kendle on June 19th, 2009

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While there’s something about flying on a tried and tested plane that makes me feel a lot more comfortable about traveling, it’s also reassuring to know that there are plenty of new ideas to improve the way we travel – both to make it faster, more comfortable and safer for us, and to make it better for our environment too.

Pilot-less Plane Can Fly By Cell Phone

Reading about a plane that can fly without a pilot is especially reassuring this week, after the Continental Airlines flight in which a pilot died of a heart attack in the middle of the flight. That incident turned out well, with remaining crew able to land the plane safely, but it could end up differently, especially on small planes with fewer crew.

Researchers in Queensland, Australia, have just successfully completed a test flight of a small plane without a pilot, and using cell phone technology to send commands to the plane. Data was sent from a cell phone to a computer on the other side of the world, in the United States, which controlled the plane. The researchers believe that “it’s possible to use one of these more advanced phones to control an aircraft pretty much anywhere in the world”, which could mean we’re in for some interesting new versions of pilots in the future.

Solar Plane To Fly For 36 Hours

One obvious benefit of flying about the clouds is that, at least during the day time hours, airplanes are exposed to an awful lot of guaranteed sunshine. That means the idea of using solar energy to power a plane is surely worth exploring, and that’s what the team at Solar Impulse have been doing.

Now their first large solar-powered plane is almost ready for a test flight, and the word is that it will be first unveiled on June 26 from Zurich, Switzerland. The plane has a wingspan of more than 200 feet, allowing a large number of solar panels to be attached. Test flights should begin later this year and in 2010, the aim is that the plane will make a 36-hour journey without needing to stop for refueling, purely powered by solar energy which it can both use and store to enable it to continuing flying at night. While the founder of the project has a vision of being able to create “perpetual flight”, I can’t quite see the need for that – but a plane that uses solar energy instead of fossil fuels has plenty of obvious advantages.