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Photography courtesy of Solar Impulse | Revillard | Rezo.ch
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Sometimes it takes an out-of-towner to remind you just how cool your city is. We’d like to thank Switzerland’s Bertrand Piccard, pilot of the record-setting, solar-powered Solar Impulse airplane, who landed his craft at Lambert–St. Louis International Airport at 1:28 a.m. today after a 21-hour nonstop flight from Dallas.
Piccard is not shy about discussing one of his heroes, Charles Lindbergh, and what it means to dare the impossible dream, in 1927 or in 2013.
“It was particularly important for me to come to St. Louis, because I was so inspired when I met Charles Lindbergh at Cape Canaveral during a launch of the Apollo when I was 11 years old,” said Piccard in a press release. “I’m truly moved to be able to land here today with Solar Impulse.”
The massive-yet-amazingly-light Solar Impulse is midway through a trip across America intended to show the world what you can do without fossil fuels. The plane is powered by 12,000 solar cells, mounted to the wings and tailplane, that drive four modest 10-horsepower electric motors.
The cross-country jaunt is really only the latest feat of derring-do by a member of the Swiss Piccard family, who’ve engaged in record-setting stunts in balloons, bathyscaphes, hang gliders, and other contraptions for the last hundred years. (Piccard’s partner and fellow pilot for Solar Impulse is engineer and former Swiss Air Force fighter pilot André Borschberg.)
We spoke with Piccard (below) at hour nine of yesterday’s 21-hour marathon flight to St. Louis.
Good afternoon. How are you? It’s a great flight. It’s 21 hours of flying just on solar power without a drop of fuel and heading for the city of Charles Lindbergh and the Spirit of St. Louis, and we’re all very excited on the team.
Where are you and what do you see? I just passed Tulsa on my right… And I have a lot of flat land, and in front of me a little bit of cloud. I am now climbing to 27,000 feet. The strategy of the flight was to remain quite low going north. In about 60 miles, I will start to turn right and take the winds from the west to reach St. Louis, and I will be climbing there to take better advantage of the wind.
How does the plane handle, compared to other craft you’ve piloted—hang gliders, balloons, ultralights, gliders… My first flying experience was as a teenager with aerobatic hang gliding, and then flying microlights. At the time, I thought it was the best way to fly, but when you don’t know other things, you’re stuck in what you do. Then I discovered ballooning, and I made the crossing of the Atlantic in ’92 from Bangor, Maine, to Spain. And then I initiated this project to fly around the world nonstop in a balloon, which I succeeded at in 1999. I think all these ways of flying were personal adventures, personal dreams, but now with Solar Impulse, it’s different. Solar Impulse is clearly useful for others, not just fun for me or for Andre Borschberg to fly the plane, but it’s useful to demonstrate what the new clean technologies can achieve. All these technologies that can increase the energy efficiency, can reduce the waste of energy in our world, that can produce energy with renewable sources, Solar Impulse is a demonstration of all that, and that’s why I feel it is important.
What are the biggest challenges for the pilot? The biggest challenge is to fly an airplane that is extremely big in wingspan. It has the wingspan of a jumbo jet, 208 feet, but it is very light, the weight of a small car, so it makes it very sensitive to turbulence, the winds, and clouds. That’s why we need to take off in the morning and land at night when it’s calm, to avoid the turbulence.
Describe the long journey of conceiving the plane and getting to today. I started to think about it just after my balloon flight around the world in 1999, 14 years ago. The project really started in 2003, I would say, after the feasibility study done by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology led by Andre Borschberg. That’s actually how I met Andre, and we decided to partner together to make this project a success. Now it’s been 10 years full-time on this project with an incredible team of engineers, technicians, IT men, weathermen, operations, flight directors, and so on. It’s beautiful to see that after 10 years, when people were saying it was impossible to do what we wanted to do, now we have this airplane flying between Dallas–Fort Worth and St. Louis.
After you cross the U.S., you plan to encircle the planet in a next-generation solar plane? Yes, this is exactly what we want to do. I think crossing the United States is the ultimate achievement we can do with this first prototype, because this prototype is not built to cross oceans. We can fly over land, but we have no autopilot; we have no toilet—so we cannot stay in the air for several days. But the second airplane that is now under construction in Switzerland is going to have an autopilot. The seats can recline, so the pilot can lie down and take a nap. We have normal toilets. We’ll have watertight wings, so we can fly in the clouds or under the rain. This will allow us to make flights up to five or six days, nonstop flights, so we can cross the Atlantic or the Pacific. The goal will be, indeed, to fly around the world in 2015.
I understand you are about to put on your oxygen mask? In a half-hour or so. When we get above 12,000 feet, I will put on the oxygen mask. And then I’ll climb to 27,000 feet and take the tailwinds blowing from the northwest to get a push to St. Louis.
How cramped is the cockpit? It’s an economy seat! You cannot lie down. It’s about the size of the cockpit of a jet fighter, of an F5 or an F16. We need to keep the weight down.
What’s it like to land? It’s a critical part. The plane is very sensitive to turbulence and crosswind. So it’s not an easy task, I would say. This is what we’ve had to train for on the flight simulators. We have built a flight simulator that allows us to understand the reactions of this airplane, because of the size and the very low weight. There is a lot of inertia, so if we correct too much the plane starts to oscillate and then we miss the runway, so we’ve had to learn how to handle this plane on the simulator, before we could fly it in reality.
Is it quiet? Can you hear the engines? I hardly hear the engines. When it is full power, you hear a little whistling, but otherwise, it is so quiet. It’s wonderful. It is slow: It goes about 40 to 50 miles per hour, but theoretically it goes forever, because we never need to land for refueling. It’s a fabulous feeling up here... Actually, this is how the world should be. We should have the same technologies in everyday life. We should have efficient electrical motors, efficient batteries, efficient light tractors, extremely energy-efficient lighting systems, insulation foams like we have on this airplane, and things like that. All this can be put in cars, in houses, and can make the world so much more energy-efficient. This is really my hope, that people understand that the technologies we use on Solar Impulse can absolutely be used everywhere.
Thank you so much, and bon voyage! If people from St. Louis would like to see the plane, they can go on our website and sign up for a visit Thursday or Friday. We’ll be staying there for several days, so it’ll be nice to present it to the people and show them this new generation of airplane.
Check out an edifying look at the history of solar-powered planes here. Check out a video of Solar Impulse landing in St. Louis this morning here.
