A 59-foot solar drone climbed to 47,600 feet and is aiming to stay up 100 hours

A solar-powered aircraft with a 59-foot wingspan has been flying over Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands, and its operators want it to stay aloft for 100 hours. The ApusNeo, built by UAVOS, had logged more than 80 hours of continuous flight when New Atlas reported on Nov. 6, after an earlier sortie that carried it to 47,600 feet.

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The altitude is the claim UAVOS makes loudest: the company says ApusNeo is the first solar plane to fly that high in European airspace, at 47,600 feet, or 14,500 meters. The longer flight now under way matters in a different way, because a plane that depends on sunlight has to survive the dark hours on battery power, and the number of nights it can string together is the real test of the design.

The 47,600-foot flight from the Canarias Stratoport

According to New Atlas, the high-altitude sortie began on Oct. 16 from the Canarias Stratoport for HAPS and UAS, located at the Fuerteventura Technology Park, and lasted 29 hours. UAVOS’s own announcement of the flight, dated Oct. 28, rounds that to a continuous 28-hour flight. Both agree on the ceiling and on the sensor load: a camera plus optical and infrared sensors streaming imagery in real time, used for ship tracking and environmental monitoring.

Aliaksei Stratsilatau, UAVOS founder and chief executive, told New Atlas that the aircraft could have climbed higher and that the airspace notice, known as a NOTAM, set the limit. In the company’s release he credited the team with preparing and running complex high-altitude test flights and said coordination with aviation authorities is building valuable experience. Spain’s air navigation manager, ENAIRE, coordinated the operation, and it has handled earlier stratospheric work from the islands, as its own January report describes.

A 59-foot wing, a 104-pound ceiling and a night on batteries

ApusNeo descends from the ApusDuo prototype, with the rear wing removed and the remaining wing stretched to 59 feet, or 18 meters. Takeoff weight tops out at 104 pounds, or 47 kilograms, and a reinforced version can carry a 7.5-pound payload. Solar panels on the wing run the motors and charge the batteries by day; after sunset the batteries carry the aircraft until sunrise.

Short winter days squeeze that arithmetic. SoftBank, which is developing its own solar stratospheric aircraft called Sunglider, has pointed out that year-round flight is hard when the sun is up only briefly, and an attempt in mid-November sits at the shaky end of the calendar for a solar plane at that latitude.

Climbing the endurance ladder toward 100 hours

The record so far is incremental. In December 2025 ApusNeo flew from the stratoport for ISSEC, a Spanish research project on sending live data to emergency services. In September 2026 two flights from the same site lasted 29 and 52 hours nonstop, according to CATEC, the Andalusian aerospace center that operates the aircraft. The October altitude flight came next, and by Nov. 6 the aircraft was back in the air with more than 80 hours logged, cruising near 30,000 feet.

It was expected to land at the technology park on Saturday, Nov. 7. New Atlas had no confirmed landing time at the point of writing, so whether the aircraft reached the 100-hour goal is not established in the reporting available.

Wildfire watch and the stratosphere question

UAVOS wants the platform to watch for wildfires, one of the biggest summer problems in the Canary Islands. Infrared sensors pick up heat rather than smoke, and a platform that can loiter for days offers something satellites, which pass overhead on a schedule, and conventional aircraft, which must land to refuel, do not. UAVOS is a technology partner of Mira Aerospace, the high-altitude platform subsidiary of Abu Dhabi’s Space42, and a separate Space42 and Telespazio Ibérica wildfire mission in Spain involves high-altitude platforms of that class. The stratoport itself has been in the works for some time, with Acciona-led construction announced at the technology park.

The payload budget explains much of the design. With a 7.5-pound ceiling on the reinforced version, every sensor on board competes for the same few pounds as the batteries that carry the aircraft through the night. UAVOS chose an Earth observation pod with a high-resolution camera and infrared sensors, a package light enough to ride a 104-pound aircraft and useful for tracking ships as well as spotting fires.

The ITU benchmark also frames the commercial pitch. Operators of stratospheric platforms talk about replacing a satellite for local jobs, with a cheaper aircraft that stays over one area for days. ApusNeo is still working its way from the lower stratosphere toward that pitch, with each longer flight adding to a record that CATEC, which operates the aircraft, can show to customers such as emergency services.

Benchmarks keep the claim in proportion. The International Telecommunication Union places high-altitude platform stations at 20 to 50 kilometers, and ApusNeo at 14.5 kilometers has not reached that band. ApusDuo reached 54,744 feet in a 10.5-hour test in Rwanda in 2023, and Airbus’s Zephyr, now run by AALTO, has touched 76,100 feet and stayed up for 67 days in 2025. No date has been set for a first wildfire-monitoring mission with ApusNeo.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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