Japanese and American manufacturers of civilian drones are preparing to converge in a new, without exaggeration, epoch-making contest. Race “Pacific Drone Challenge”: whose drone is the first to overcome the path in 7300 miles from Silicon valley to the coast of Japan? Prerequisite – without refueling in one trip.
While participants two Japanese iRobotics and American Sabrewing Aircraft Company, but the competition is completely open and it has no time frame. This is the ideological legacy of the pioneers of long-range aviation, who a century ago sought to cross continents and oceans to set new records of speed and distance flights. Not so much a race as a new challenge to the technical and engineering genius of man.
Modest but significant precedent has, in the past year, a modified version of the serial drone crossed the channel over 72 minutes of continuous flight. Super-drones Facebook, according to rumors, may already be in the air for 90 days. But this does not mean that they are capable of difficult flight over the biggest ocean on the planet. In Aircraft Sabrewing believe that the weather will not allow you to fly in a straight line all the time and the real path will be in five hundred miles longer, and it’s 45-50 hours in the air.
The concept Sabrewing Aircraft Company — cuatrovientos drone fixed wing
Such flights are the quintessence of the efforts of the creators of the drones, they will have to assemble and debug is the best that they have. The reward will be is not a fact of record, and the opening of a new, very profitable horizons. When pilot Charles Lindbergh to solo across the Atlantic, the world saw the dawn of the post and passenger traffic between the continents. Today we are talking about the same thing, but using unmanned vehicles.
Source — Pacific Drone Challenge