RAeS Farnborough Branch - The Zephyr High Altitude Pseudo Satellite (HAPS)

well thank you very much indeed it's an absolute privilege to be here and be allowed to talk about something that has been a massively important part of my life now for 17 or 18 years now so hopefully you'll detect a sense of enthusiasm and ambition in my tone and hopefully you'll leave with that same spirit of adventure for this very novel and new and exciting technology so what am I going to talk about so I'm hoping that when you leave tonight you'll all be experts on zephyr and I hope you'll be able to answer these questions they're very simple questions which are what is a zephyr why do we fly it in the stratosphere how it works what does it do what is the point of it and what next for this this exciting program so I've certainly been involved the program for a long time I've been somewhat obsessively involved in the program the person who actually invented Zephyr was Chris Kelleher who I suspect many of you may have met or in work with in his time he very sadly passed away four years ago this summer and I think it'd be brilliant if he could have seen what was F has become it was very much his brainchild we have a factory just two hundred meters away from here and these sort of R&D and design arm of it's on the opposite side of the airfield this really was his vision come true so it's a very very pleasing point to see this journey being being fulfilled and it's not many people who get to see this huge journey in one career either so very exciting times for the industry and a small quote from Chris himself among many other things he said so a bit about before I go into what is Zephyr I was gonna give you a plotted history behind some of the motivations and and robots inspirations that have informed and influenced the product we have today now solar-powered flight is not really a new thing and I suspect anybody who's a glider pilot would argue that they are in some way performing an act of solar powered flight by virtue of the convective cells that give them lip I'm really talking about solar electric flight where we convert solar energy into electrical energy and create power that way but even that isn't a particularly new thing and NASA in the 1974 we're flying what was a semantical to a ready control plane on solar electricity but that really was a Morris stunt it didn't wasn't an act of war and it was certainly wasn't a product but what's really influenced the design we have today is some of the endeavours in human powered flight so I know there are some people in the audience who do human powered flights so forgive me if I get any of this wrong but some of the points in history that of most worthy of note really set the scene for the sorts of powers and drags that we are interested in discussing when we talk about solar powered flight in the stratosphere so I have a father-in-law who is a professor of Sport Science and he assures me that mere mortals like us when we get on my bicycles and pedal for a few hours we're typically able to output about 100 watts of useful mechanical work the Tour de France athletes when they're doing their legs can typically sustain about 300 watts a mechanical output of work and if you get one of these these people who really got sprinting who have thighs the size of my waist that you can sustain about 600 watts for a few minutes but that's that sets the scene that that is the sort of mechanical output power a human is capable of transmitting through a mechanical system to eventually find its way into an air flow is thrust and provide lift and it's the marvelous flying machines that they pioneered that noon and innovative sport with that really has set the scene for is it possible or was it possible to build part this aircraft that could fly in the stratosphere using such a technique so in 1980 the gossamer penguin was the first solar-powered aircraft capable of carrying and now they have to pedal to get off the ground and it carried an array which is capable of generating 500 watts to support them and their their machine the sort of aircraft I design when it flies at sea-level consumes somewhere between 100 and 200 watts of electrical power to cruise so we are a locally more efficient than a man carrying aircraft but we certain that the complexes you're having to house them but bear that in mind and everything I talk about when I talk about tradespace power weight efficiencies we are talking about single-digit watts of electrical power and very very low quantities of thrust you know propulsion systems which generates 20 Newtons of thrust not kilonewtons that 20 Newtons of thrust that's like taking a bag of sugar two bags of sugar and dangling them under under 1g and you know it's really quite quite little so that's part of the motivation behind where we've come from air environments in the late 90s I was a student at this time and I remember listening to a radio report reporting on their achievements of the Pathfinder plus record-breaking aircraft and thinking to myself I wonder if I would be fortunate enough to work on an interesting project like that and there I think it might have influenced me in some way but certainly those Pathfinder project flights which were experiments to explore the atmosphere explore the stratosphere and very much identify the requirements for flying planes up there those extreme altitudes in there's uncharted conditions there was a very high profile set of adventures in aviation by Solar Impulse and Bertrand Piccard in his a global circumnavigation in in 2016 or complete in 2016 so Zephir the talk that I've come to brief you on it started before many of these acts it was started in 2001 as an idea it was an idea to support a man carrying high-altitude balloon attempts to celebrate the launch of a new company called kinetic so there we go it was a publicity stunt and the marketing department opened an internal competition to ask for some ideas to come forward to capture high-resolution video and still imagery footage of this huge towering balloon that was intended to carry two brave pilots up to 130,000 foot and break a new world record the two ideas were put forward one weapon system which was a missile fired off spinning away taking photographs as it left the parts didn't like the idea of that and the idea was a solar electric aircraft it's heathered to the balloon on a very long tail about 300 meters which would orbit around it with the camera in its wingtip pointed back at the the balloon far enough away seeding any fisheye lens effects and that idea gathered pace sadly the world wrecking record-breaking balloon attempt did not go ahead as planned and that meant that aircraft didn't fly my aircraft was Zephyr the idea gathered pace and a lot of people were more interesting the the supporting aircraft than the balloon so we turned it into a formal study got a bit of research money and we prototyped it and demonstrated that it was viable to build very lightweight structures and project them into the stratosphere using solar power but we had to wait for battery technology and it wasn't until 2010 when a very advanced prototype Zephyr 7 broke the world endurance record for all aircraft by staying a lot for 14 days over the southwest USA and at that point the the world stood up and took notice and thought well there's something in this what you do about it kinetic sold Zephyr to Astrium astrium was part of EAD s a stream as a satellite company they're interested in pseudo satellites which is a generic term for this type of aircraft pseudo satellites big aircraft really that sit in very high altitude but in the atmosphere behaving like satellites astronaut of EAD s which became Airbus and that is the a very abridged version of the story but that's how Airbus came to own Zephyr and came to invest so heavily in this and start building factories to build a genuine capability out of this very innovative product and last year we saw the maiden flight of that product so all of our R&D efforts find tweaking has paid off and given us the first of our products this is not a prototype anymore it's a product and that is what we we're focusing on now and so I'm gonna tell you a little bit about how that system works and what it does so it's a ultralight so electric aircraft that operates in the stratosphere photovoltaic cells gather photons from the Sun can work that into electrical energy or electrical power and pass that power through copper wires actually all the minium wires to the propulsion system and that generates thrust and it cruises in the stratosphere now excess power from the solar array that is not needed to cruise that altitude is used to charge very high capacity batteries and those batteries then take over when the Sun sets so the aircraft can continue to fly continue I operate all of its systems and continue to continue to operate its payload come dawn when the Sun rises again the cycle repeats so the solar array takes over it charges its batteries and it repeats and repeats and repeats and so such a system doesn't need to carry fuel because it's being refueled all the time and it is only limited in its endurance by its battery technology the number of times you can charge and discharge a battery until it weakens its capacity such that it can no longer support a flight through the night so many of you probably thinking that's sinteres it sounds like a an energy budget you know a bit like an accountancy accountants budget of energy into energy out over 24-hour periods and that's exactly what it is so the length of day and length of night is actually crucial to how you design this aircraft the types of technology you need to make it work and at some point in the in the latitude range that covers the earth at some time of year it worked very well and at some points it doesn't work very well so for example in the middle of winter in the northern hemisphere at the North Pole whereas consistent darkness it's rather difficult to make a solar electric aircraft work but as he comes south in the middle of that winter you find a latitude for which the length of the day and length of the night work which the length of day is long enough to grab that solar energy shoehorn into your your high-capacity batteries and the length of that night is short enough to ensure the plane can operate and make it through to dawn without depleting its batteries so that is the key for us fraud that's our design challenge is to make sure that range of latitudes is large enough over all times of the year that we have a really useful product that can persist reliably competently in stay in the stratosphere and the important thing is remember it's got to step there overnight and it's got to stay up there overnight in the middle of winter so there are some seasonal missions there's some seasonal use cases and that's why you know it's very interesting to look at say Europe we're at a very high latitude here we were approximately 52 degrees this technology would allow a Zephyr to fly over Farnborough for about nine months of the year but that it the technology does not permit it to fly here for in the midwinter yeah we there are fewer than eight hours of daylight and a very long 16 hour night it's incredible that you know we were looking very different technology to make it work here but it may surprise you to know that 85% of the world's population live between plus and minus 40 degrees latitude I had to research that heavily myself - I simply didn't believe it because I didn't live between plus and minus 40 degrees latitude and nor does anyone in London nor does anyone in most of North America but a huge percentage of the world's population does live between that and that's the zone that we are targeting for this this product for year-round precision operation up to plus or minus 40 degrees latitude and then seasonal coverage outside that range so quite a complex a concept to grasp all about a delicate energy balance and designing your system to work such that you can use it usefully over as much of the globe as possible over a varying day and night length and close that energy budget positively if you go into the read on energy budgeting for Zephyr that means you're losing altitude and and that means you're descending and I'll explain why that's a bad thing in a few moments so why so high sounds like made it's a really difficult challenge for us why choose the stratosphere to operate well the answer that is very simply the whether there are jet streams there are human timbers clouds there are all kinds of nasty things in the troposphere the part of the atmosphere that contains the weather but we very disruptive to a slow-moving aircraft like a zephyr the next question natural question is why is it so slow moving can't you bought fittings create a solar-powered fast-moving plane that can cut through the air a bit faster that answer comes down to power density from the Sun so we are gathering solar energy to fly one square meter in orbit pointed the normal to the sun's radiation so pointing directly at the Sun gathers 1.3 kilowatts per square meter soon as you bring that into the atmosphere and put it on projected right down to sea level only generates about 700 watts per square meter because all the UV light gets taken out by the atmosphere and as soon as you're at a grazing angle that square meter is no longer getting the full incident radiation so we find that the power density from the Sun is actually very low when compared to other forms of power generating fuel that you can set fire to and burn in an internal combustion engine or ax or a jet and when you do your optimization studies and limit yourself to only solar energy the only way you can make it work is to fly very very efficiently very very low power to crews and the best way to achieve that is to fly very very slowly so this graph graphic here which is an artist's impression of the atmosphere we've got altitude on the y-axis and speed on the x-axis the red curve indicates approximately the trend in Zephyrs true airspace as the speed in zero wind it would cover as measured at the ground and since its ground track speed so as the density gets less has to fly faster to generate sufficient lift to maintain its altitude that's the typical shape you get from that the blue line is a typical profile of a radiosonde going up through the atmosphere and measuring wind speed and there is a it usually most locations you can find at about 40,000 feet you find a high wind layer and that is the jet stream so we avoid the jet stream we avoid convective weather features and we fly above the troposphere where weather is and we fly in the lower stratosphere in the stratosphere there is no weather it's very stratified that's where it gets its name from very little vertical air motion and that's why we've chosen it that is why we got there and the other important note is that as you fly faster and as you fly hotter the power required for flight increases exponentially so there is a there's an optimum point the sweet spot at about 65,000 feet where it is possible to an aircraft that can fly on this low power density energy available from the Sun and cruise at that height and charge batteries to get through the dark part when it the sunset and close that energy equation and that's at 65,000 feet so you can put a little bit higher you can play a bit lower the sweet spot is about 65,000 feet and that's where there's a global minimum in wind speed so understand the straight space of what we're doing here when we come to operate this system work out where does it fly the first question to answer is how high must the aircraft fly so you understand what we're avoiding those weather effects they vary throughout the globe northern latitudes or very far southern latitudes we have a polar jet stream you may have heard of a subtropical jet stream lots of weather effects that we have to avoid so what's it what this flight operations look like for a zephyr like I said it flies very slowly it takes us about eight hours to get from surface all the way to the lower stratosphere so it's you know waiting very long but during that time you are a bit vulnerable so that is why we go to locations in the world where the climate is usually favorable for Zephyr operations in the UK in 1976 there was a window to launch a Zephyr we missed it unfortunately technologist wasn't quite ready we look forward to the next opportunity maybe they'll happen to be there not within my life I'm not sure we don't launch at very high latitudes which are visited frequently by frontal systems you just don't get the assurance of getting the climate you need to launch and recover these aircraft the opposite of the launch the eight hours up there Zephyr takes about 24 hours to glide descend out of the stratosphere so we're very much a victim of our own efficiency there and that we find it hard to lose altitude and drive it down drive it down so an aircraft is launched at these semi strategic launch and recovery locations it takes a few hours to get to the stratosphere and it's launched on what we call line-of-sight datalink so it's you can see the plane there's datalink commanding controlling it and you get some telemetry back and you can have a payload on there get wideband payload back but but that's all done in within line of sight once we've commissioned the aircraft and sat for a minimum of 24 hours in the stratosphere checking all systems are working well we commissioned it as being a success or document any specification shortfalls where there might have been you know a battery failure or something there's a decision to be made which is a err where the B is it going to fulfill its mission requirements the o we're the ones very easy it's black and white if there's a critical system that's not working it comes back down if it's a if it's a non-critical system though it's down to economics the decision might be we're expecting a year's endurance we're only gonna get three months endurance from the data we're looking at is it worth sending on its way for its mission or is it worth biting the bullet and landing it noun correcting that those are the sorts of decisions that we face as a service operator once we're playing the game of statistics and putting lots of these aircrafts up there so it operates between sixty and seventy five thousand feet for most locations sixty thousand feet is adequate for a lot of locations though and certain times a year you need to be at a minimum of 65 and that is just to avoid the weather a few figures of merit which are worth noting from 65,000 feet you have a terrific vantage point for sensor operation the horizon is 500 kilometers away the last time I gave this presentation was in Australia so I had to convince the Australians what 500 kilometres looked like and what a diameter of a thousand kilometres looked like so I said Sydney to Melbourne imagine that and they all went oh oh and send that that's amazing and in one day although we fly slowly up there in the stratosphere we can move a bit faster because the air is thinner and we can typically cover about 1,000 nautical miles is about 1,800 kilometers so for Australians they could relate to transiting between North and South Australia in a 24-hour period I've translated this into British and I can say that if we park one these over Carlisle you can look at one horizon see John O'Groats and the other horizon and see Lands End so that's very interesting from radio comms perspective that's the sort of footprint of influence this aircraft holds for electro optic sensors cameras things like that you could Park one over the center of London and quite easily survey the m25 without changing your location so it really a massive footprints of influence and again that puts into context how quickly we can move this pseudo satellite around the globe so I've got a little video here I don't think I'll play the music but this gives you an idea of what we're dealing with how we launched it how recover it so this is a little story about our maiden flight the plane was went through its final integration assembly just over there 200 metres away in the Kelleher factory finish off the first plane and packed into a nicer container and it's the Southwest USA we set up in a temporary facility it's actually Facebook's unwanted tent that they used after their adventure in this sort of technology and we we were operating from the Yuma Proving Ground it was the first time in four years that we had deployed a full-size Zephyr so a degree of remembering how to do it now we haven't worked on developing the launch method since the last time we flew it's launched by hands people jog forwards and release it it's so slow you can run faster than it and once they'd released it eight hours later it was up in the stratosphere I've got a little bit more on the payload itself but so this is real footage from a sensor that was carried on that flight I'll talk a bit more about the player capability later up in the stratosphere very benign conditions really benign conditions it creates a really great imaging platform with no vibration but a great big gas turbine rattling away behind us all very slow very critically damped so huge success maiden flight not very many maiden flights involve 26 days of continuous flying and a trip up to the stratosphere for all of those days most people do a bit of taxing first and maybe they they might you know do a few circuits not us we go straight up there and fly for nearly nearly forever so but how okay so we've seen a bit about what it is how does it work I've talked about this very delicate energy budget the balance between energy in energy out key to it is ensuring that the power required to cruise at high altitude is as low as you can possibly design it so in order of priority how to achieve that very low cruise power it is through really obsessive design of the Aero structural error structure so that we not only select a wing profile and Aero concept which is incredibly low drag but we make it realizable we don't just let the aerodynamicists have a field day it's got to be a practical wing section that we can mount useful things inside and offers useful capability it's got to be realizable you've got to be able to physically build it out of existing materials so every component on that aircraft has been scrutinized as to what its function is what it's loading profile is and has been delivered as with as little mass as possible o aerostructures when they go through tests at the factory we do a structural acceptance test where every structure has sandbags laid out on it to project it to different parts it's flat envelope to make sure we build a good structure and show that we have a continuously good process of delivery during that test we put a approximate a 10 Graham structure and we hang a hundred 80 kilograms of ballast of it so you may have seen this pigeon thought that is rottenly fragile how'd they possibly launch and recover them they're actually very strong when they're in the flight envelope so it's bit like a ship out of water in that huge sport at one place it would break Zephir in its flight envelope is very strong its ultimate load is 5g so very lightweight very low drag Aero structure very high efficiency propulsion system so about 85% of our onboard stored energy goes through that propulsion system so every percentage point counts and I do go here is a propulsion system designer your wave so work harder make them look more efficient next thing is our avionics system so carrying an avionics system is is an overhead see it's therefore a function we want to ensure this few precious watts go to that as possible and as little mass is devoted to it's possible so we take the best practice in the space industry and we try to make them even lighter so our avionics system I think is as light as we can make it it's distributed around the aircraft there's a distributed and battery system the aiviq system manage the batteries manages flight control manage navigation manages all the data links it does an awful lot for what we have there it's very lightweight and all done in-house the next thing and the the most important lever on performance is a very high energy density spat power storage system the battery so in the commercial world the biggest driver for the technology is volumetric energy density people don't mind if the mobile phone heavy they do mind if they're projected back to the 80s with a large brick beside the ear they want them to be very small we want our we got a bit of volume we don't mind about if the batteries are quite large we would like them to be as lightweight as possible so we track specific energy dense so what hours per kilogram and that is the crucial lever in our selection of battery technology and we don't just want very high specific energy density we want very high cycle life as well to under ensure we can fly for months if not years at a time but the priority is to make sure we fly high enough and avoid that weather we used to talk about power generation as being a critical technology it certainly is critical to the function of the system but I can safely say that solar array technology is now here and we have access to array technology which will see the the full life of our aspirations for this product the metric we track there so so that array power generation is watts per kilogram so the number of the amount of power you generate per per kilogram as well as as efficiency we can't have it would be possible to have a very very high watts per kilogram metric but have such a low efficient array that you need an area bigger than your wing area its amount it so we also track efficiency which is the main metric most people deal with but if you're putting in designing solar cells for your roof at home for domestic energy production you tend not to worry if they're very heavy but you do mind if you have enough roofs that they so they attract just efficiency we need to track just a bit more than that we'd make multi lights and be able to conform to our wing surface shape because they are part of the flying surface alright so here's a detailed picture of a zephyr 7 aircraft I wouldn't show you a detail picture the separate one that would just be letting all secrets out this does illustrate the point now Zephyr is a span loaded structure and span loading means that in an idealized sense every bit of lifting surface is responsible for generating lift for carrying the weight immediately beneath it so in principle if you could span load your aircraft in an idealized sense you wouldn't have any primary structure however you do have some point masses you have to carry batteries we have to carry a propulsion system we have to carry payload we have a fuselage a tail plane these represent point masses so we do have primary structure but we try to minimize the mass contribution or mass percentage so that's what spam loading is and it means that we've got a district distribute everything and and that's the design concept we follow in zephyr now what does it do very simple answer it stays Zephyr stays reliably in the stratosphere all night now this chart here is a career-high for me I can see you're all overwhelmed with it I will explain further what we're looking at here is altitude on the y-axis and day number in flight or time along the x-axis the blue line that Wiggles around a lot is the flight profile that Zephyr 7 followed in 2010 when it achieved 14 days continuous flights in the southwest USA what you notice is during the daytime its flew very high indeed it was touching 70,000 feet in places but at night time it fell out of the stratosphere it plummeted down to about 30 to 40,000 feet it lacked the system efficiency to stay in the stratosphere all night and it was coming down to the altitudes of greatest vulnerability to weather effects and just the things I've just preached you about that we try to avoid we redesigned the aircraft completely every component was revisited and we were able to take the Zephyr 8 on its maiden flight and demonstrate that we had locked it in the stratosphere we had 100% succeeded in closing that energy budget and not has closed it by a a fraction we had closed it confidently such that we could project that capability all around the world this graph is really important to remember if you ever meet any of our competitors ask them to ask them to show you their algae profile because if they are not in the stratosphere all night they are not in the game perhaps they're not there they're not ready have retrieved this a lot of people to say are your battery technologies improved and well since 2010 to 2018 eight years I'm a bit disappointed with the improvement battery technology we've only seen a 20% increase in specific energy density so 20% did not account for that huge huge performance improvement what counted was the meticulous attention to air a structural mass reduction we we took 25% out of the air air structural mass and replaced that with useful mass in the form battery we can carry 50% more battery than zephyr 7 could our propulsion systems more efficient the array is better every aspect of that system is better and so on the back of a mere 20% improvement in battery technology we have a product that is cutting-edge and able to lock itself in the stratosphere confidently and not fall out of that it will avoid the whether it works who physics it's now proven we can do it so this is why I refer to this is my career-high because we're the first to do it and no one else is remotely close to it and the products that are coming through aren't close to it their wing loading is too much they aren't going to fly as high as this so do ask them you'll meet them do ask them show us that graph so what's the top level spec it's we've got lots of variants every plane we launch is different it's got different payload on it got different we span load it we we vary load distribution by moving batteries around we're always less than 75 kilograms our endurance their design endurance so how to what length and depth have we gone in our qualification evidence to say how long can Zephyrs live up in that harsh high UV and ozone environment the answer is a minimum of two years we are only limited by battery cycle life and battery cycle life is is great already you know we've got a very long endurance batteries in in our arsenal of technology we can throw into this plane it's the current battery technology the one that I showed you associate with that graph if we pile in all the batteries we can onto the air structure we can project Zephyr for year-round operations to plus and minus 25 degrees latitude it's quite useful but it's not what we are programming walls that doesn't capture that 85% of the population of the world to go higher than 25 degrees we have to wait until it's not winter at that point and move up there as soon as you're away from the 21st December in the northern hemisphere you can make progress it's really a very demanding design point the planned improvements say we take another 20% improvement on battery technology and that realizes our full capability pedda capacity wise we fly between 4 and 12 kilograms of payload mass you think it's laughable what can you possibly do with that I've heard Global Hawk carries a ton or you know that's another high-altitude UAV you can get a lot into into one kilogram of electronics today we can compete with all the capabilities in space in terms of remote sensing capability resolution we are far close to the planet's surface and that's why we are better at it than any sensor in space we behaved like a geostationary satellites but we are we're 20 times closer to the Earth's surface than the lowest Leo low-earth orbiting satellites and unlike them who are in typically in polar orbits with the days between revisit times we can loiter over an area just like a gestation satellite but hoovering up that high-resolution imagery so you get back a lot of punch into a few kilos of electronics these days what's all the players on we're talking about like all innovative disruptive technologies it's usually the military that adopts it first what are they driven by they they're like communications like electronic surveillance they like imagery like high-resolution imagery they're like pattern of life information those payloads that deliver that capability have huge roles and potential in the civil domain as well so imagine a youth space which is forefront of the Australian life where they use bit lose billions out of their economy every year in bushfires a zephyr over that region can deliver connectivity to the firefighters in areas where they have no infrastructure to communicate they can track the location of the firefighters and ensure that every single firefighter knows where each other are they the plane can Hoover up systematically where the fires are no firefighter just want to see streaming video of a fire what they would like to know is a map with a fire line on it a direction of movement what foliage is downwind of it and how quickly it's likely to move we Hoover up all that information from a zephyr transfer that into the Internet it's analyzed pumped back out to the Zephyr and distributed to the infrastructure the firefighters are following and that sensor consists Civic electro-optic camera visible camera and mid remote sensor a couple of radios and the same sensor package is equally useful to the firefighters is to the Coast Guard and all that mission is born out of a very similar requirement for military so it's very much the buzzword is dual use we have a small portfolio of payloads which of immense interest and attraction to a number of different end users now this is where the model breaks from convention we're not interested in selling airplanes we want to sell service so we want to put planes up there the end user are unaware of how they're getting the information they just pay for the product at the end that means they don't have to maintain the planes that have to operate the planes they don't have to worry about any of the risks of ownership of an aircraft or the unusual way in which this aircraft needs to be operated they just get the product at the end of it so you can imagine there's a fleet of aircraft with a common set of payloads able to serve as a number of different very interesting user requirements and so what does Zephyr do it flies for months at a time I don't know if anybody was watching on flight radar last year we were flying for a long time over the southwest USA over the Yuma Proving Ground that blue squiggle in south hatbox is the trail of where the plane flew we were trapped inside restricted airspace for that particular mission if you take that blue squiggle and straighten it out straighten out straighten out straighten out it goes one and a half times around the circumference of the globe so in 26 days that's how far you can fly and that was well we just you know we didn't optimize that route or anything to it for for distance you may have become aware of a new phenomenon called stratospheric art where a very bored crew to pass the time were sending love messages home in the stratosphere will you marry me Airbus or air bees there's a little sketch from one particular board shift but yeah a hugely successful maiden flight so what does payload footage look like from the stratosphere so this is actual footage from Zephyr last year this particular footage is taken from an angle but also rectified to make it look like you're directly overhead it was over a two megabit per second data link which is why it looks a bit jerky so it was bandwidth throttling but it gives you an idea of how effective sensors can be from the stratosphere just because we're so high up does not mean we don't have the ability to perform high-resolution reconnaissance and surveillance and other tasks this is a prototype for this particular payload this footage is about 26 centimeter resolution the roadmap for that particular payload is to improve that to about 15 centimeters in the very near future so that's the sort of thing we can get from the stratosphere and that's one example of a payload applique so very relatable one what do you see if you put a camera out the side but what next for Zephyr there's a number of strands the payload applications a one aspect of that and we're very much challenging the art of the possible we'd like to put radars on board we'd like to put all kinds of software-defined radios on board to do all kinds of radio relay applications a big move in the civil world is connectivity so this is providing bandwidth to remote locations or bandwidth from the Internet to places where there is difficulty in getting infrastructure in place power is only one aspect of it legislation approval we currently operate under permits so for civil flying we have a a Civil Aviation Authority issued flight permits for military flying we have a military flight permit a lot of people ask about type certification well at the moment that doesn't really get us anywhere because there are all kinds of challenges to face that there are global challenges as to how we negotiate a globally recognized standard four types certifying these unusual aircraft and how we further enforce an agreement that allows us to cross international borders without further permission but at the moment we ask permission before we cross any international border and we got a fairly good model to follow there we've been very successful with a number of locations to gain our permits but legislation approval is another strand and underpinning all of it is the technology we are chomping at the bit for the next battery technology we really want to expand to operate year-round between plus and minus 40 degrees plus almost 25 although impressive we need to expand that and that's what so I mentioned earlier we're aiming to provide year-round services it's not the old model of selling aircraft it is selling a service to assemble all right so we're saying what next we have opened Airbus is open the first world's first operating sites so this is the sub portal for accessing the stratosphere for launching and recovering from there we've chosen Australia for a number of very good reasons one is that as a location gives terrific access to both the Indian and Pacific oceans the oceans are a bit like super highways for Zephyr and that you don't cross state boundaries getting long distances so it gives us good access to East Africa or Southeast Asia the two Americas and there's a very progressive regulator in Kassar the Australian Civil Aviation Authority and there's a picture of the sites as it is today so the technology really is here we market there's f/8 product as Zephir ss4 single tail it's the first it's the smallest conceivable viable HAP's aircraft it's the smallest aircraft with today's technology that you can close that delicate energy budget it's real and is here now we've got a we're so comfortably build a factory and I'm proud to say we are now on aircraft number 11 so there is a piece of material in that factory called aircraft 11 and there are at least five aircraft deployed throughout the world ready to go we are just the start of this industrialization process so taking away from this presentation is that it's a really exciting new innovative form of aviation the air bosses effort is the first to market and we have years of advantage everyone else when you do see everyone else's presentations do ask that awkward question and let me know email me what the answer is anyway any questions you

Channel: Royal Aeronautical Society

Views: 6,145

Keywords: aerospace, aviation, airbus, zephyr, future

Id: Fo9kjDCOUeU

Length: 46min 34sec (2794 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 15 2019