Katfish Kapers: May 2016

This one of a kind bird - the Solar Impulse 2, flew into town. Doubt it will reproduce (or go into production).

What you're seeing is the solar powered airplane "SI-2" inside a hanger.

It's an interesting plane, but I wouldn't want to fly it (more on that later).
The SI-2, like the name implies is powered solely by sunshine converted to electricity. During the day, some of the electricity provided by sunlight goes to running the four electric motors, the rest goes to power the stun gun in cockpit (to keep the pilot awake) and recharge the batteries.

The batteries are all stuffed into the pod behind the motor

The plane is quite big, the wing span is longer than a 747.

When you first see it, it looks like a normal, solid plane - until you look closely. Then you realize that everything has been constructed to reach a certain carefully engineered strength - but no more. If you look at the propeller spinner with the light behind it - you can see right through it.

It took a flock of Canada geese to bring down Captain Sullenberger's A320

A pigeon strike would be serious to the SI-2

Leading edge of the wing

That being said, it is a very well built airplane, it just has a mission you don't normally see. Fly slow and far. Oh and yeah, you don't get any fuel. The wings are covered with a really really thin film of solar cells (thickness of a human hair). 17,248 of them to be exact. The number of them really doesn't matter, but the power output sure does.

Starboard wing, the material in the background is the tent protecting the SI-2

The whole plane is a working compromise between having enough power from the sun to both fly an airplane (and recharge batteries so that it keeps flying at night) and not be so heavy that it can't get off the ground. It's amazing it works so well, but it isn't the first plane to try to fly using almost no power. Consider the Gossamer Albatross in 1979 that flew across the English Channel using just one exhausted skinny biker.

The SI-2 may be large, but it isn't powerful. 40 horsepower. Total. Each 10 hp motor swings a 13 foot propeller.

Hard to believe the prop is 13' in diameter, but it is

Curious to know what other airplane can fly on just 40 hp?

1937 Piper J-3 Cub

I flew a J-3 once. It's a very nice flying plane (duh! it's a trainer for God's sake). You just have to take local winds seriously if you want to actually go someplace. The SI-2 has the same problem, only worse. Planes with big long wings are usually slow. The reason the 747 can fly at close to the speed of sound is that it has approximately 120,000 hp to ram it through the air.

This is the proposed flight path the SI-2 will take on it's ground-breaking around the world voyage. By ground-breaking, I mean nobody's ever flown around the world without fuel (not ground-breaking meaning it will crash into the ground in multiple sites around the world).

So why, if the SI-2 doesn't need fuel, are there so many stops? Why isn't this a non-stop circumnavigation? After all, Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager did it, non stop, in 1986 in the Rutan Model 76 Voyager

Easy, nobody would volunteer to fly 25,000 miles at 35 mph stuck in an economy class size seat. It took the Voyager 9 days to fly around the world using a gas engine. The SI-2 is so slow it would take an entire month to do it in just one attempt.
This is the cabin.

This is the cockpit panel

This is all the room you get

That's it. Not much room. You can't even open the window to yell obscenities at the seagulls passing you. Imagine sitting in one spot for the 2 1/2 days it took to fly from Hawaii to San Francisco. I couldn't do it. But this guy not only could, but in fact, did.

This is Bertrand Piccard.

If the name is familiar, no surprise - he's one of two lunatics to circumnavigate the world in 1999 in a balloon.

I use the word lunatic because it took him (and Brian Jones) 19 days to float around the world (non-stop). AND because Bertrand is a Swiss psychiatrist who speaks 135 languages (OK, I made that part up, however, I spoke with him and his English is beautiful).

The cockpit has few creature comforts, but it does have one thing that this guy really really wanted.

Charlie Lindbergh

A GPS

Spirit of St Louis cockpit (replica)

Lindbergh navigated mostly by compass, stopwatch, and by peering out the periscope (the Spirit had no front windscreen).

"I flew over the first boat without seeing any signs of life. As I circled over the second, however, a man's face appeared, looking out of the cabin window. I have carried on short conversations with people on the ground by flying low with throttled engine, and shouting a question, and receiving the answer by some signal. When I saw this fisherman I decided to try to get him to point towards land."

On the other hand, Lindbergh only had to sit in the cockpit for 'only' 33 hours. Bertrand (or Andre)

are stuck there for days. The SI-2 doesn't have an autopilot (it only has a wing leveler) so how do they get any sleep? Truth is, they don't get much. They wear armbands that vibrate and wake them up after 20 minute catnaps (if the weather is good). At least the seat has a built-in toilet (Lindbergh had to pee out the window).