Solar Jet This Week's Green Darwin

This week the Gangrene Award, an award given to cretins who pretend to be green but are not (kind of like a Green Darwin Award), is given jointly to Solar Impulse of Switzerland and the International Air Transportation Authority (IATA). These two parties have entered into a partnership agreement to develop a solar powered jet. http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7010068304

The jet which will be the size of an Airbus 300 Superjumbo will only seat a pilot and no passengers. What is not reported is that the jet will never fly at night and can only fly in westerly direction to avoid the sunset if it indeed can be powered by solar panel. The truth is that it cannot be powered by solar panel without falling out of the sky if it is going to be a superjumbo jet that will carry four hundred or more passengers. http://www.plane-spotter.com/Aircraft/Airbus/A300.htm The Airbus 300 has a mass of 100 metric tons without fuel and has a wing area of 260 square meters. The incident sunlight at high noon is 1 kilowatt per square meter. The most efficient commercial photovoltaic cells are 22% efficient. Therefore if the entire wing area is covered with state-of-the-art solar panels this Rube Goldberg device will generate the amazingly low power of a 1984 Ford Escort Engine with an output of 57.2 kilowatts.

By comparison the two jet engines on an A 300 each have a cruising thrust equal to 170 kilo-Newtons (75% of their maximum thrust). One kilowatt is the power is expended when a thrust of one kilo-Newton propels an object at a velocity of 1 meter per second. At a cruising speed of 800 kilometers per hour or 222.2 meters per second, each of the 170 kilo Newton jet engines on an A300 expends power at the rate of 37,774 kilowatts. Both jet engines therefore expend power at the rate of 75,548 kilowatts or some 1,321 as much as the paltry 57.2 kilowatts the PV cells could generate at high noon.

The imbeciles at Solar Impulse and their partners at the IATA are the winners of this week’s Gangrene Award for their ability to spend seventy million dollars on this hair brain idea that may only be able to power the emergency landing lights. IATA now stands for “Idiots Aboard The Airbus”.