This aircraft has no moving parts and does not need engine to fly

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – Engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have announced that they have successfully piloted the first "solid-state" aircraft that has no moving parts and does not require fossil fuel.

This flight is an important milestone in the technology of the "ionic wind" and could pave the way for quieter and greener aircraft in the future, engineers said at the publication of their results in the newspaper. Nature Wednesday.

"This is the first ever sustained flight of a plane without moving parts in the propulsion system," said Steven Barrett, an associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT, according to the press office of the research center. "This has potentially opened up unexplored new possibilities for quieter, mechanically simpler aircraft that do not emit combustion emissions."

Nearly 115 years ago, the Wright brothers entered history by launching the first man-made flight – a feat that ushered in human dominance from the skies.

Since that first flight, most aircraft have used moving parts such as propellers or turbines to power them in the air.

This is not the case for the MIT aircraft, which developed around the concept of "ionic wind" or electrodynamic thrust.

To perform the flight, a battery embedded in the fuselage provided 20,000 volts of electricity to a series of wires connected to the width of the plane under the wing. The electric field created a stream of nitrogen ions from the wires to the rods located at the back of the aircraft, powerful enough to generate sufficient thrust for sustained flight.

Barrett, who is the lead author of the project, said the idea of ​​the ionic plane came from the television series "Star Trek". As a child, Barret was inspired by shuttles flying silently through the air without any moving parts.

This fascination led Barrett to the concept of the ionic wind, which dates back to the 1920s.

The team designed a light aircraft weighing about five pounds and a wingspan of five meters. By testing the design inside a gym, the team managed to fly the plane over a distance of 60 meters, a feat repeated 10 times.

The MIT team hopes to develop their ion plan so they can fly longer with less tension. In the shorter term, the design could have applications to make smaller planes, such as drones, quieter.

"It was the simplest plane we could design to prove the concept that an Ion plane could fly," Barrett told MIT. "It's still far from an airplane that could accomplish a useful mission. It must be more efficient, fly longer and out. "

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