A solar-powered plane that flies in the dark? With a man in it? Did I mention that it will fly around the world, along the Tropic of Cancer? It sounds like madness. But Bertrand Piccard, a record-breaking Swiss hot-air balloonist who is, incidentally, a qualified psychiatrist, thinks the crazy thing would be not to try. "What is dangerous," he says, "is to think we can continue consuming petrol at the rate of one million tons per hour without destroying the planet."
In a hangar at the Dübendorf military airfield on the outskirts of Zürich, Piccard and his business partner and fellow visionary, André Borschberg, a former Swiss fighter pilot — who knew? — are at work on Solar Impulse, a manned zero-fuel plane designed for pollution-free flight. Supported by a team of specialist engineers from six countries, more than 100 technical advisers, and nearly a dozen corporate partners (including Omega, the first watch taken to the moon), the $88.7 million operation is massive. As is the plane: With its 260-foot carbon composite wingspan, Solar Impulse will be even wider than an Airbus 340 yet will weigh less than an SUV and have the wing load of a paraglider. A 2,150-square-foot skin of photovoltaic cells will convert solar energy to run the plane's four 12-horsepower engines, which will generate a modest cruising speed of 44 mph while storing enough juice in the batteries to propel the plane between sundown and sunrise.
Attempts at unmanned solar-powered flight are nothing new. In 2003, NASA's remote-controlled 247-foot-wide Helios went U-shaped and crashed into the Pacific Ocean off Hawaii. But only Piccard and Borschberg plan to introduce a pilot into the equation and — in 2011, if the schedule holds — to circumnavigate the globe, at heights up to 40,000 feet, on the same amount of power available to a department store window. The plan is to complete the 23,000-mile journey in five stages, each lasting three to five days, with stops to switch pilots.
After four years of research and development, Piccard and Borschberg are standing on a stage inside the Dübendorf hangar wearing gray bomber jackets with the collars turned up, a 20-foot model of Solar Impulse nearby. Piccard, 49, has impossibly bright blue eyes and an eager, mission-ready face. Borschberg, 55, a graduate in management science from MIT, wears his hair swept back and could pass for Robert De Niro's brother. The prototype is impressive, yet conspicuously fragile, with four propellers and a tiny egg-shaped cockpit that's barely wider than the pilot, suspended beneath the vast wingspan. Borschberg describes a process of constant optimization: "If a part doesn't break, why not? Is it too heavy?"
As a child, Bertrand Piccard attended space launches at Cape Canaveral and is sharply attuned to the value of exploration as theater. An early black-and-white photograph shows his grandfather Auguste Piccard poking his head from what appears to be a giant tumble dryer but is, in fact, a pressurized aluminum gondola tethered to a gas balloon. In it, Auguste spent the 1930s setting and breaking altitude records before rising to his personal best: 72,000 feet. Conversely, Bertrand's father, Jacques, is the author of Seven Miles Down, the tale of his pioneering five-hour descent in a steel capsule to a depth of 36,000 feet in the ocean off Guam. Bertrand was merely pursuing the family business when he performed the first circumnavigation of the world in a hot-air balloon, the Breitling Orbiter 3, which departed from Switzerland on March 1, 1999, and landed in Egypt 19 days, 21 hours, and 55 minutes later. Piccard describes the Solar Impulse project as "the logical next step."
