The Navy flew a solar-powered, unmanned drone for 73 hours straight, recharging the plane’s batteries during the daytime on solar power to fly through night hours without coming back to earth.

In total, officials with the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division flew the Skydweller drone off the Mississippi coast for nearly 220 hours, or over nine days, with breaks on the ground for inclement weather. The longest single flight was 73 hours, or about three days straight.

And engineers think the plane can fly longer.

“The constraints between the size of the range and the weather at this time of year in that region just didn’t cooperate to allow us to go further,” said Bill Macchione, he division’s manager for drone projects. “There’s no reason to believe we couldn’t have run that entire

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