Recently, with the need for fuel efficiency finally permeating every level of our society and government, a fairly large amount of time and money has been dedicated to the art of solar powered air travel. Airplanes are a huge consumer of fuel and subsequently a sizable emitter of pollutants. With the always appealing lure of a Department of Defense contract, aerospace and longtime military contractors Boeing and Lockheed Martin, along with Aurora Flight Sciences, are working hard to develop an unmanned solar aircraft that can fly for five years straight — certainly a start in the right direction.

There are also privately funded solar airplane experiments such as the Solar Impulse project and the “Hy-Bird.” The former is intended to fly around the world using naught but solar power and the latter to circumnavigate the globe using solar and fuel cell power (hence the witty name). Solar airplanes, in general, tend to have huge wingspans in order to accommodate oodles of photovoltaic cells, and a very narrow body to reduce drag. Concepts have been put forward addressing the idea of solar powered commercial aircraft, but for now and the foreseeable future, while these may be worthy ideas, they are ideas at best. This due mainly to the problem of lift, which requires immense energy to take off and achieve high altitudes.

Much lighter and unmanned solar aircraft, such as the spy planes conceived by the DoD, are much more feasible and, in fact, already in use. But for those of us hoping to hop on a PV airplane for fifty bucks because there’s no fuel used, well, it will be a long wait. Yet, one hopes in the shorter term, that innovations in solar energy technology spawned by such projects will have a beneficial impact on the efficiency of residential solar electric systems — after all, we the taxpayers are taxpaying for it.