My interest in electric flight goes back to my PhD, which looked at a method to coordinate UAVs providing internet services from the air [1]. The idea of very long duration flights based by aircraft fuelled by hydrocarbons was clearly impractical, but solar electric aircraft offered a lot of potential.
Inspired by the stunningly successful AIrbus ‘Zephyr’ solar UAV, I wondered if it would be possible to use solar-powered aircraft to provide internet services. After retiring from AIrbus I was offered a Visiting Professorship at Liverpool Hope University to develop these ideas with a PhD student. We had a very interesting time developing models of solar aircraft and using these models in multi-UAV simulations [2]. The paper is a work in progress as it periodically gets refined, as does the corresponding MATLAB model.
Coordinating several UAVs on communications missions is an interesting problem. I’ve collaborated with researchers from Liverpool Hope, Cardiff, Aberystwyth, Aston and other universities to investigate different ways to address this problem. Some of the resulting papers can be seen in the bibliography.
At the same time I decided to take up flying radio controlled aircraft. Apart from the fun of flying, I had a feeling that the university was going to need to demonstrate some of our ideas so a competent RC pilot would be a useful asset to the team.
