UAVOS ApusNeo reaches 47,600 ft, targets 100-hour endurance

By Tom Whitfield

UAVOS's 59-foot (18 m) ApusNeo flew 29 hours over Fuerteventura on October 16 and reached 47,600 feet (14,500 m), the ceiling set for its mission at the Canarias Stratoport for HAPS & UAS in Spain's Fuerteventura Technology Park.

The ceiling came from NOTAMs, the pilot notices defining restricted airspace, coordinated by Spain's air navigation manager ENAIRE. UAVOS founder and CEO Aliaksei Stratsilatau said the aircraft “could have gone higher.” UAVOS also claims ApusNeo was the first solar plane to fly at 47,600 feet in European airspace; the report provides no independent audit for that designation.

Solar panels on the wing powered the motors and charged the batteries by day. After sunset, ApusNeo drew on stored energy until sunrise, completing a full day-night cycle on the 29-hour flight.

What did the altitude test establish?

ApusNeo took off on October 16 to test altitude after endurance work came first. In September, CATEC, the Andalusian aerospace center that operates the aircraft, recorded two nonstop flights from the same stratoport lasting 29 and 52 hours. The source does not specify a year for those flights or the October takeoff.

The platform also has an earlier local R&D assignment. In the previous December, the same model flew from the stratoport for ISSEC, a Spanish project examining how high-altitude platforms can send live data to emergency services, ENAIRE said.

Development reaches back to 2018, when the prototype ApusDuo had a 46-foot (14 m) wingspan and two wings in tandem. ApusNeo drops the rear wing and stretches the remaining one, according to Stratsilatau, leaving a single-wing configuration.

The aircraft weighs up to 104 pounds (47 kg) at takeoff. A reinforced version can carry up to 7.5 pounds (3.4 kg), covering the payload capacity relevant to an Earth-observation instrument.

The Earth-observation payload combined a high-resolution camera with infrared sensors and sent images to the ground in real time. For wildfire work, the infrared channel detects heat rather than smoke, making it the relevant instrument for spotting and tracking fire.

What did the 100-hour run show?

During the report's writing, ApusNeo was airborne again. UAVOS said the aircraft had logged more than 80 hours and was working toward a 100-hour goal. Noticias Fuerteventura reported it cruising near 30,000 feet (9,100 m), below October's ceiling, and expected it to land at the technology park on Saturday.

The run was still in progress, so 80-plus hours was an intermediate total, not a completed record. The source gives neither a calendar date nor final landing time for this sortie and does not identify CATEC or ENAIRE as the verifier of the live figures.

In theory, ApusNeo could remain airborne for weeks if daylight lasts long enough. That remains a projection, not a demonstrated flight. SoftBank, which is developing its own solar stratospheric aircraft, Sunglider, has likewise pointed out that short winter days make year-round flights difficult.

How far is ApusNeo from HAPS operations?

The International Telecommunication Union, the UN agency that manages the radio spectrum and defines high-altitude platform stations, places those platforms 20-50 km (12-31 miles) above Earth. ApusNeo has not reached that band; its 47,600-foot peak remains below the lower limit.

UAVOS says the earlier ApusDuo came closer, reaching 54,744 feet (16,686 m) in a 10.5-hour test in Rwanda in 2023. That company-reported flight still fell short of the ITU floor, despite lasting 10.5 hours.

Airbus's Zephyr, now operated by AALTO, provides the higher benchmark. AALTO says Zephyr reached 76,100 feet (23,195 m) and, in 2025, stayed aloft for 67 days, 6 hours and 52 minutes. Those figures exceed ApusNeo's demonstrated altitude and endurance on both axes relevant to persistent HAPS service.

What would make the wildfire mission operational?

Wildfires rank among the archipelago's biggest summer problems. The case for HAPS rests on persistence. A low-orbit satellite passes a given point for only minutes, while a crewed aircraft or conventional drone eventually lands to refuel. A solar HAPS can remain over the same forest for days or weeks, detect a fire earlier and follow its spread.

ApusNeo does not yet meet either the HAPS altitude definition or the endurance implied by that duty cycle. It also flies below the altitude at which the platform's intended operational role would begin, leaving a substantial engineering gap before fire-service use.

UAVOS is a technology partner of Mira Aerospace, the HAPS subsidiary of Abu Dhabi's Space42. Stratsilatau said UAVOS is “ready to prepare the aircraft for future missions and fit it with more advanced payloads.” No date, contract, payload specification or operational customer accompanies that commitment in the source.

For R&D managers, the report leaves several budget-critical items unresolved: development cost, test expenditure, battery capacity, solar generation, payload accuracy and any named funding source. It describes at least five completed flights across Spain and Rwanda, plus one unfinished endurance run, without disclosing a test protocol or independent performance dataset.

The next portfolio milestone is a completed, fully documented payload sortie showing whether ApusNeo can close the endurance and altitude gaps identified in Fuerteventura.