PV Gap

Marsha Said:

Airplanes and Solar Panels?

We Answered:

Well, let's get the obvious out of the way first.....the sun itself. The panels would only be generating electricity when in sunlight, which means in daylight hours and above any cloud cover. Granted, a long-haul flight will spend the vast majority of its time above the clouds, so that may not be a huge issue. Night flights though, will be a huge issue.

The next obvious issue is weight.
I'd imagine that aircraft manufacturers would be extremely wary of adding any extra weight to a craft, especially a system that may not serve any purpose at times....on night flights for instance. When the system isn't generating any power, it will be pure dead weight, and that's usually carefully avoided. Manufacturers are trying to increase the power/weight efficiencies, so adding a system that will at times be unusable will reduce the efficiency. Not good.

There's also the question of would the cells actually produce enough electricity to enable the usual system of generation, which is one of the engines I believe, to be unnecessary? Obviously the idea of the solar cells is to reduce/remove the electrical generation load on that one engine, thus increasing it's efficiency by dedicating all of it's time to propulsion. Again though we are faced with the "what if?" question of how feasible would this be without the necessary element...the Sun.