DARPA Loves Long Flights

That's right, DARPA is at it again with a pretty crazy project. DARPA is looking to have an aircraft built to meet some pretty crazy criteria. The main one being, a 5 year flight duration.

Yep, DARPA wants to fly an aircraft for 5 year straight without touching down. The aircraft will be mainly used to sample the atmosphere over the five year mission time. DARPA has named this project the "Vulture" project.

DARPA is close to awarding a contract and will move forward after that. The picture above is of the NASA long endurance aircraft and could be one possible design choice for entries into the project.

Currently the longest duration aircraft flying is the Global Hawk. The Global Hawk is an UAV that can fly for 40-48 hours straight without refueling. This new proposed aircraft would fly for 1000 times longer than the Global Hawk. Some ideas of how this could be achieved include solar power which would work really well and possibly fuel cells.

We'll see how this interesting project pans out in the near future!

Godspeed