Chip Yates says he wants to do a transatlantic flight next year with his electric airplane Long-ESA, swaping batteries 5 times over the atlantic ocean by docking to flying drones. How about that for extending range?
Can it somehow be made safe for a passenger airplane to dock with flying battery swap stations every 2 hours?
Maybe you'd have a hybrid so just in case the dock does not work (and there could perhaps be 2 or 3 backup drones nearby along the way), you can still switch over and have enough kerosene to reach any number of backup plans, getting to the next battery swaping drone area (perhaps if initial difficulty is a storm or something like that) or at worst having enough fuel to land even when doing a transatlantic flight.
How would the battery drones get up there? I dunno, maybe hot air balloons launched from boats along the way? Maybe the depleted battery can also get recharged by solar energy right up there in the air, not needing to be flown down and up from the boat each time.
Last edited by Charbax; 10th May 2013 at 07:46.