Hydrogen powered drone exceeds one hour of continuous flight. “The advantages of fuel cells over batteries for our customers are clear; fast refuel, no vibration, quiet operation, zero emission…& 3x more flight time than batteries. Fuel cells are a game-changer for the commercial UAV market.”
https://www.theengineer.co.uk/hydrogen-powered-drone-one-hour/
6 Comments
Hydrogen powered laptops with 50hr run time never materialised.
Hopefully this will.
Batteries cause vibration and are not silent operation or zero emmission? Huh?
I’m sure the governments will *love* these when some assholes start using these drones as remote controlled mini-bombs.
Hobbyists were building 1 hour flight drones with lithium a good 5+ years ago.
There’s octocopters from a company called Tarot that do pretty much the same. Also, it’s a bit misleading to quote unladen flight time, most octocopters only quote fully loaded flight time – its pretty easy to get 45min+ flight times on a massive drone like this with ground effect and no load.
Also, what the fuck is the point of quick refuels when changing out batteries costs maybe 10 seconds and you have a FULL HOUR to charge backup batteries?
I could see the point if they can get an order of magnitude better flight times out of drones, but this is just a bunch of bullshit.
And of course hydrogen is the safest, least flammable substance in the universe, so no problems there