Impulse to soar

This Dec. 17, the world will mark one of the biggest, most valuable human accomplishments since the invention of the wheel: the first flight by the Wright brothers, which took place in 1903, 111 years ago.

Although that flight lasted just 12 seconds and covered just 37 meters (121 feet), it changed the world.

"I'd guess that the Wright brothers never imagined, in their wildest dreams, a modern jumbo jet that could hold hundreds of passengers or the technology that we are developing here, which has unlimited potential," says Bertrand Piccard, creator and pilot of the Solar Impulse aviation project, at the unveiling of the project's second model, Solar Impulse 2, at the Payerne Air Base in Switzerland last week.

Solar Impulse 2's flight capabilities are just the tip of the iceberg. The aircraft is an airborne technology exhibit and laboratory that could change our whole way of life. It uses clean, green technology, the sort that does not waste resources of any kind, certainly not fossil fuels, or damage the environment. It does not pollute the air, water or soil. It uses the last unlimited resource (more or less): sunlight.

Israelis are no strangers to the use of solar energy; solar water heaters are used every day. But once this technology matures, it can be harnessed to fuel cars, boats or even elevators (already in development). It can be used to light streets and homes, run factories and machines, and just about anything else. The range of possibilities is staggering.

The development of more efficient collectors and lightweight batteries are what will make this idea practical. Piccard and his partner in the project, Andre Borschberg, take pride in the fact that their engines reach 97 percent efficiency, while the efficiency rate of the internal combustion engine (running on gasoline) is 35 percent at best. As for when the idea will become practical, Piccard and Borschberg believe the technology will become usable in 10 years. Light aircraft will be using this technology fairly soon, and large aircraft will be using it within 25 years, they say.

To demonstrate the enormous potential of solar aircraft, Solar Impulse 2, which runs exclusively on solar energy, will take off in March 2015 for the most ambitious project imaginable: circling the globe without using a single drop of fuel. The flight path begins in Abu Dhabi, passes over India and China and across the Pacific Ocean to Hawaii and San Francisco. From there it continues to New York, crosses the Atlantic to Europe and ends where it began, in Abu Dhabi. The flight will take about five months from start to finish, and the aircraft will be in the air for about a month of that time. Piccard and Borschberg will take turns in the pilot's seat.

From simulation to reality

Piccard and Borschberg face enormous challenges. Take crossing the ocean. Taking the aircraft's speed into consideration -- a cruising speed of about 75 kilometers per hour, with a maximum speed of 90 kilometers per hour -- each such crossing takes five days and five nights. This means that a pilot must sit in the cockpit for five days and nights straight, without ever leaving his seat.

This is a tremendous physical challenge. To make it possible, the plans for the pilot's seat include three positioning options: a vertical back, an inclination of 45 degrees and an inclination of 180 degrees, for use as a bed ("It's an upgraded business-class seat," Borschberg says jokingly). The pilot can allow himself to sleep for a maximum of 20 minutes at a time, and only during daylight hours. While the aircraft is over land or flying at night, he cannot sleep at all. And that is without mentioning more basic needs, such as relieving oneself. To meet these challenges, Piccard and Borschberg practice various relaxation methods such as yoga.

There is also the extraordinary technological challenge. Solar Impulse is the first aircraft that not only uses solar energy to fly (the patent has existed for 40 years); it is also capable of storing solar energy in batteries.

"The old solar aircraft, which could not store energy, displayed the idea's limitations rather than its potential," says Piccard. "To show the potential, we have to fly at night as well."

The ability to store energy in batteries, which sets Solar Impulse apart from all the other electric aircraft, enables the aircraft to fly even when there is cloud cover and, of course, at night. But this ability is also the aircraft's weak point, because the batteries are heavy. The batteries contribute about 600 kilograms (1,323 pounds) to the aircraft's total weight of 2.3 tons (about the weight of a large car). That is no small matter.

Weight is a critical factor in any takeoff and flight, and even more so in this case. Solar Impulse's wings, which reach a span of 72 meters (236 feet, or longer than that of a Boeing 747 jumbo jet), are covered with a skin of embedded solar cells all along their length. But since each square meter of solar cells produces only a single kilowatt of energy, the engines need to be small, and the entire aircraft must be lightweight.

"The candlemakers were not the ones who invented the electric light bulb," Piccard says. "We did not want to repeat the mistake that was made with the electric cars, where they took a regular car and just changed the ignition system. It is no wonder it is not considered a success. The Tesla [the electric car being developed by Elon Musk] is better because it was planned by people who are not in the auto-making field. For Solar Impulse, we wanted creative, outside-the-box thinking. If aeronautical engineers had planned it, it would have come out like a Boeing and weighed just as much."

The aircraft's planning was done by the most advanced innovative means available: the CATIA system produced by Dassault Systemes, a three-dimensional system that allows each part to be examined from every angle without being physically manufactured. The simulation, which provides the planners with a completely realistic picture, allows them to "hold" the part that they are examining in their hands. If the system shows a 3-D map of the human body and you "hold" the heart in your hand, you will feel it beating.

The CATIA system also allows several kinds of tests to take place on the screen with no need to conduct them on the ground. This conserves resources and reduces damage to the environment.

"The actual flight on Solar Impulse was quite similar to the simulator flight," Borschberg said, to the system's credit. "Dassault Systemes also made us an avatar, a virtual pilot, on which we carried out all the tests. We used the avatar to plan the cockpit and the location of its switches, to make sure that each one could be reached comfortably. We put the avatar under pressure in various ways and learned where it 'hurt' -- which is critical information for us."

Dassault Systemes' 3-D system is used not only in the aviation industry, but also in the vehicle industry and even in supermarkets.

"The ability to show an utterly realistic image of the world allows planners to be truly creative without being limited by bureaucracy or opinion," says Pierre Marchadier, vice president of Dassault Systemes and a former combat pilot in the French Air Force.

"I will give you an example: In the French Air Force, I flew a Mirage 2000 aircraft and took part in sorties in Bosnia. One day, my patrol partner and I spotted a Serbian MiG 29. We learned that the Serbian pilots were independent. They did not listen to orders from the ground. Instead, they did whatever they felt like doing, more or less. Since the Serbian aircraft's flight pattern looked hostile to us, we asked for permission to shoot it down. Unlike the Serbs, we had to go through a very long chain of command that went all the way to the highest levels of the French government. While we were waiting for permission, the fuel in the tanks ran low and we reached the point of no return. When the permission came, it was already too late: We did not have enough fuel to continue the pursuit and shoot the plane down. That honor went to two F-16 fighter jets from the Netherlands that took our place. We prevent missed opportunities like that by giving creative and engineering freedom to the planners and engineers who use our systems."

Creating art

Bertrand Piccard first thought of the Solar Impulse project in 1999, when he and his partner, Brian Jones, completed their circumnavigation of the globe in the Breitling Orbiter 3 hot-air balloon.

"When we landed, we discovered that we had just 40 kilograms of natural gas left, which would have given us only two more hours of flight time," he recalls. "There was a single step between us and failure, and I promised myself that I would never again be in a situation where I was without fuel."

Piccard, born in 1958, descends from a respected family of visionaries and inventors. In 1931, his grandfather, Auguste Piccard, became the first person to soar into the upper atmosphere in a hot-air balloon. His father, Jacques Piccard, was a well-known maritime researcher and the first person to explore the deepest depths of the ocean, including the Challenger Deep at the southern end of the Mariana Trench, the deepest known point in the earth's seabed hydrosphere. Besides being an aviation pioneer in hot-air balloons and aircraft, Bertrand Piccard holds several world records in aviation and is also a renowned psychiatrist.

Andre Borschberg, Piccard's partner in the project, is an engineer with a master's degree in management science from MIT's Sloan School of Management. A former jet pilot in the Swiss Air Force and licensed to fly various kinds of airplanes and helicopters, Borschberg also holds many world records.

Over the 12 years of the project, with the two aircraft that were produced as part of it, has cost about 50 million euros, which Piccard and Borschberg raised from various commercial partners.

"It's only 4 percent of the budget of a Formula One racing team," Borschberg says. Among the project's partners are large corporations in various fields, such as Bayer MaterialScience, the Swiss watchmaking company Omega and the Clarins cosmetics company -- but no aviation firms. Faithful to the principle of thinking outside the box, Piccard and Borschberg have done their fundraising with no help from aircraft manufacturers. Dassault Systemes is the sole exception.

Solar Impulse 1 took off for its maiden flight on April 7, 2010. In the summer of 2011, it completed its first international flight, from Switzerland to Belgium and from there to the Paris Air Show. In 2012 it broke yet another record, with the first transcontinental solar flight to Morocco. In 2013, the project ran into an unexpected snag that threatened its future: a structural failure of the aircraft's main spar during static testing. That could have been a death-blow for the project, which is based on only a single aircraft each time. An engineering or structural failure of the planned aircraft could have pushed all the timetables back so far as to cancel the project entirely.

But Piccard and Borschberg proved their mettle once again. Instead of giving up, they took the flying model of the aircraft to the United States and flew it from coast to coast, from San Francisco to New York, in daytime and at night. The flight's splendid success, which got wall-to-wall media coverage, brought the project a new partner, among the best imaginable: Google.

Solar Impulse 1 racked up 500 flight hours, as planned, and completed its life cycle. It will now be on display in the Paris Science Museum in the Parc de la Villette.

"Solar Impulse 2 should be on display in the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York because it is true art," Borschberg says with a smile. In the meantime, the aircraft awaits the start of its life's mission: circumnavigating the globe on solar energy alone.

What is the next challenge?

"Circumnavigating the globe in continuous flight, with no stops," Piccard says with great seriousness. And you know what? With all he has accomplished so far, he may just do that, too.

The writer was a guest of Dassault Systemes.

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