The Plane That Flies Forever

Researchers at a military base in Hawaii have an ambitious goal: building an airplane that can fly forever, CBS News Correspondent John Blackstone reports.

The Pathfinder aircraft takes off at a leisurely 20 miles an hour. But it has already flown higher than any other propeller aircraft, using less power than most home appliances

NASA scientist Steven Wegener is part of the Pathfinder team.

"A 500-pound airplane flew to 71,000 feet on the power of just five hair dryers. Just amazing stuff," Wegener said.

Amazing too, the aircraft doesn't have a pilot.

It is one of a number of strange looking remote controlled planes now in development. They can do jobs the most daring pilot might turn down. One version flew into a Hawaiian volcano.

On test flights, if things go wrong, there's no pilot to worry about.

In the future, whole fleets of pilotless planes could be looking down on Earth, handling telecommunications, watching the weather, taking over many jobs now done by satellites

"They're less expensive, you can put 'em where you want them and take higher resolution photos than you can ever get off of a satellite," Wegener said.

The particular beauty of the Pathfinder aircraft is that its refueling station rises every morning in the East. The plane runs entirely on solar energy. So not only does the Pathfinder not have a pilot, it doesn't have a fuel tank.

"It's like a huge wing of solar cells," said Richard Swanson, who designed the solar cells that could keep the Pathfinder aloft forever.

"Conceptually it could stay up indefinitely," Swanson said. "But as a practical matter, they're talking five to six months at a time."

The Pathfinder might just prove that what goes up does not necessarily come down.

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