Electra.aero has achieved an important milestone, the successful maiden flight of a solar-battery hybrid electric research aircraft. The 90-foot wingspan unmanned test aircraft nicknamed ‘Dawn One was one of the first manufactured aircraft at Electra’s Virginia facility.
The aircraft is a part of the Stratospheric Airborne Climate Observing System (SACOS) program.
Professor James G. Anderson, Harvard University said: “SACOS is designed to innovatively address a broad range of scientific missions and serve as a climate observing system that will herald a new era in the quantitative dissection of the physics, chemistry, and biology controlling critical climate systems. The high-spatial resolution observations from SACOS will provide, for the first time, quantitative forecasts of risk associated with rapidly expanding wildfires, the increasing rate of sea level rise, the intensification of severe storms, and global shifts in arid regions that trigger water shortages.”
This solar-battery aircraft is part of Electra's ongoing development of reduced and zero-carbon aircraft propulsion technologies, which also include turbine-electric and hydrogen fuel cell-based hybrid systems.