Long-endurance aircraft Archives

What sets Skydweller apart from its predecessors? Its foundation is built on the Solar Impulse, the first solar-powered aircraft to circumnavigate the globe. This heritage provides Skydweller with a robust design capable of carrying substantial payloads. With a wingspan of 236 feet (larger than a 747) and weighing just 5,620 pounds (about the same weight as a Ford F150), the Skydweller can carry up to 800 pounds of payload.

A milestone achievement

Skydweller Aero recently achieved a significant milestone by completing a series of uncrewed autonomous flight tests. The longest of these flights lasted an impressive 22½ hours, launched from the company’s facility at Stennis International Airport in Kiln, Mississippi. This achievement demonstrates the feasibility of remaining airborne for extended periods using solar energy and batteries.

Kurt’s key takeaways

Watch / read FOX’s CyberGuy Feature Skydweller Aero:

Link to video – https://www.foxnews.com/video/6364663907112

Link to article – Solar-powered aircraft achieves groundbreaking 22-hour autonomous flight | Fox News Video

Skydweller, Skydweller Aero, Skydweller.Aero, SkydwellerAero, aerial, aircraft, airplane, autonomous, autonomy, drone, plane, solar, system, UAS, UAV, uncrewed unmanned — A Skydweller Aero video

Share the joy and triumph of our recently completed flight test campaign by watching this Skydweller Aero video, available here

A huge solar-powered plane is being tested off the Mississippi coast. It could spend months in the air.

The company behind the airplane says first batch of tests showed their technology will work.

BY BOB WARREN | Staff writer

An aviation company pushing the boundaries of solar-powered flight has successfully finished the first in a series of tests for its uncrewed airplane, taking off from Mississippi’s Stennis International Airport for six flights high over the Gulf of Mexico.

The company, Skydweller Aero Inc., says its aircraft — essentially a giant drone with a wingspan greater than a 747 — had one flight lasting 22.5 hours and another lasting 16 hours during the initial testing campaign.

The success of the initial tests marks “a new era in autonomous aviation,” Skydweller Aero CEO Robert Miller said.

So much so that the company is in the process of building two additional solar-powered planes. They will be assembled at Stennis, Miller said.

The company says it is developing technology to enable its airplanes to eventually spend months cruising at 40,000 feet, guided by a team of techs on the ground and using only the sun for fuel. The top of the plane is equipped with 17,000 solar cells that spend the day collecting sunlight, then store that energy in batteries that power the plane.

Skydweller Aero unveiled its airplane, also called Skydweller, last March during a media event that drew Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves and both the Magnolia State’s U.S. senators. The company has since been testing it over the Gulf, taking off and landing at Stennis’ airstrip in Kiln, a 15-minute drive from the Louisiana state line.

During the initial round of testing “things generally worked as we planned and simulated,” Miller said.

The flights were overseen from a control room at the company’s Stennis site and monitored from the company’s offices in Oklahoma City and Madrid.

What’s next?

Next up is to “integrate payloads,” that is the surveillance equipment the aircraft will use on its missions over the Gulf or Caribbean Sea, Aero CEO Robert Miller said this week.

Miller said the early test flights have been a success and mark a huge step forward for the company.

“We are excited to continue pushing the boundaries of what uncrewed solar-powered aircraft can achieve,” Miller said.

The testing is being performed in a partnership of sorts with the U.S. military. The Navy had awarded the company a $5 million development contract in 2021, and Miller said more military contracts are in the works “for significantly more than that.”

The next phase of testing will push into spring 2025, Miller said.

The end goal, Miller said, is to have a fleet flying out of south Mississippi for months-long surveillance missions looking for drug smuggling or illegal fishing operations.

The privately-held Skydweller Aero, which is headquartered in Oklahoma City, set up shop at Stennis International in 2023, promising a $15 million investment. It also brought with it some $40 million in “advanced solar-powered aircraft inventory,” the Mississippi Development Authority said at the time.

The airport’s location along the Gulf was a major drawing card, Miller said.

“That’s where we need to operate,” he said. “That’s where people are doing nefarious things.”

That location does have one challenge: the potential for severe weather during hurricane season. Miller said testing had to be done around tropical weather threats popping up in the Gulf.

Aviation, space tradition

At the time its airplane was publicly unveiled last spring, the company and state officials said Skydweller Aero’s work would continue a rich tradition of aviation innovation along the coast, noting the proximity of the company’s operations to NASA’s John C. Stennis Space Center nearby.

Reeves and the other elected officials also touted the company as a potential jobs producer.

And that might already be coming to fruition.

Miller said one new airplane is expected to be complete by the end of next year and the other sometime in 2026. And the company says it expects the full-time workforce to grow from 15 now to 65-75 in the next couple of years.

The assembly is painstaking and precise.

“You don’t just put a 236-foot wingspan aircraft together in your garage,” he said with a chuckle.

The original article, including photos exclusive to the Times-Picayune, can be accessed here: Solar-powered plane off Gulf Coast could spend months in air | Business News | nola.com]

Social Media Influencer “Papa Mississippi” is a proud Mississippian.

He is so happy that Skydweller Aero flies from Stennis International Airport in Kiln that he made this video.

Enjoy!

The Oklahoma-headquartered firm on 30 September said the Skydweller UAS successfully conducted a series of autonomous long-duration flights in recent weeks, including one sortie lasting 22h 30min and another spanning 16h.

SkyDweller Aero completes tests of ultra-long-endurance solar aircraft | News | Flight Global

The complete article can be accessed here (subscription required): Skydweller Solar-Powered UAS Completes 22.5-hr. Flight | Aviation Week Network

Excerpted from Aviation Week:

…the Sept. 22 mission demonstrated the feasibility of staying airborne for weeks to months on solar power and batteries. “The data gathered validates our model for multiday flights,” co-founder and CEO Robert Miller says.

The flights also showed the aircraft’s ability to fly in operationally relevant weather. “We’re not flying in Yuma in July. We’re flying over the Gulf Coast in hurricane season,” he says, referring to previous record-setting solar-powered UAS flights conducted over Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona.

Autonomous flights with no pilot on board began with a 3-hr. 10-min. mission on. Sept 14. A 16-hr. 11-min. flight followed on Sept 19-20 and led up to the 22-hr. 22-min autonomous flight on Sept 21-22. The flight was cut short because of the risk of high winds from the approaching Hurricane Helene.

“We got plenty of data from the 16-hr. and 22.5-hr. flights that shows we can do perpetual flight,” Miller says. Another reason for truncating the final mission was the aircraft is flying on new, high-performance batteries, leading to concerns about performance at low voltage after powering the aircraft through the night. But the flight showed “we have more margin than we thought we had,” he says.

The longer flights also demonstrated the aircraft ’s redundancy and turnaround between missions. A circuit breaker failed early on the 16-hr. flight, but the system redundancy handled the failure correctly and the aircraft flew on for another 13 hr., Miller says. The breaker was replaced aft er landing and a day later the aircraft was launched again. “We put a new one in and it flew for 22.5 hours,” he says.

The flights also showed the aircraft ’s ability to operate in the vicinity of weather, as the 16-hr. flight was conducted with developing thunderstorms in the area. “This shows we can fly in an operationally relevant environment,” Miller says. This supports the Skydweller UAS’ use for long-duration missions from the U.S. over the Caribbean and West Africa where the Pentagon does not have forward bases.

Because of its size…the Skydweller UAS can carry heavier payloads than other solar-powered and most medium-altitude uncrewed aircraft. The aircraft is flying with two line-of-sight data links and three satellite communications systems—Iridium, Inmarsat and Skylight—with a fourth to be added. “That’s a lot of capacity,” he says.

Seeing Skydweller in flight for the first time, some southern Mississippi folks enjoying themselves on the bayou made this video.

Even without a video, seeing Skydweller in flight for the first time is likely something they will never forget.

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Skydweller is the world’s largest uncrewed, all-carbon fiber aircraft with a wingspan greater than a 747 and weigh about the same as a Ford F-150, capable of performing extreme endurance flights with heavy, powerful payloads. Skydwellers will be used for ultra-long duration missions such as providing exclusive economic zone enforcement, monitoring naval activity, and detecting drug smugglers and pirates at sea, and will accomplish these missions with zero carbon footprint.