Health & Fitness
Is it a bird? Is it a plane?
A 70-foot-long "flying machine" with a 208-foot wingspan weighing less than the car I drove in to get there...
There it was in semi-darkness inside Hangar 19 at JFK.
A technological wonder. A 70-foot-long “flying machine” with a 208-foot wingspan weighing less than the car I drove in to get there, only about 3,500 pounds, capable of top speeds lower than those I reached enroute on the Belt Parkway, barely 50 m.p.h. on a good day, or actually night, which is another interesting facet of this modern marvel. Night flight.
This was the Solar Impulse, the airplane powered solely by solar energy that had just made history as the first aircraft to fly across the United States without a single drop of fuel. Swiss pilots Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg, taking turns in the plane’s single-seat cockpit manned the two-month long flight in several stages. First taking off on May 3rd from NASA's Moffett Field in Mountain View, California, the Solar Impulse went to Phoenix's Sky Harbor International Airport in Arizona, then to the Dallas-Fort Worth airport in northern Texas, then to Washington Dulles International Airport in Virginia and finally to New York, arriving on July 6.
In the hangar, with the pilots and other scientists nowhere to be found, a handful of young Swiss men were on hand to offer literature about the plane and answer basic questions, and large flat screens offered videos of the plane’s assembly, testing, and each segment of its groundbreaking journey.
Beyond the “yes, it works” nod to solar energy that the Solar Impulse provides, many other things about the project surprised me.
The pilots (the Solar Impulse was their brainchild, after all).
Mindful of the many risks involved in manning the very low-flying, sensitive to air current, unusually light-weight Solar Impulse, you might consider the pilots to be crazy.
Mr. Piccard is in fact a psychiatrist by trade, who in 1992 was brought in to help the pilot of hot air balloon crossing the Atlantic to manage stress, he is probably best known as part of duo who first circumnavigated the globe nonstop in a balloon in 1999. More interesting perhaps, you might say exploring the unknown is in his blood. His physicist grandfather, a friend of Albert Einstein and Marie Curie, Auguste Piccard, invented and made dozens of flights in a pressurised aluminium capsule attached to a large hydrogen balloon, succeeding in reaching the stratosphere to verify the theory of relativity. Mr. Piccard’s father, an engineer and undersea explorer and environmentalisst, designed and occupied the first submarine to plunge the depth of the earth’s crust.
Mr. Borschberg, you might say, was also born to fly. A former jet fighter pilot in the Swiss Air Force, he holds both professional airplane and helicopter pilots’ licenses, and his hobby is aerobatics. A mechanical engineer and successful entrepreneur in his native Switzerland, after graduating from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in mechanics and thermodynamics, he earned a Master's in Management Science from the Sloan School, MIT, in Boston. For the Solar Impulse project, Mr. Borschberg directed the construction of the aircraft and the preparation of the flight missions.
The darkness.
It turns out that the aircraft was on display inside the hangar, not outside baking in (and drawing on) the sun, for a reason. The structure is made an extremely light carbon fiber, said to be three times thinner than paper, which cannot withstand prolonged direct sunlight. The plane itself flies at night, using stored solar power in batteries contained in the cockpit area. While solar cells (see the story about those below!) depend on the sun for power, but the light-weight structure needed to hold them cannot handle much of it. The epoxy resins in the carbon fiber that essentially hold the plane together degrade with extended UV exposure.
The solar cells. The Solar Impulse uses the solar energy collected from 11,628 solar cells along its huge wingspan. To understand the magnitude of this, consider that the average solar panel contains about 60 solar cells, and the average house powered by solar on Long Island has about 25 panels on the roof. So, doing the math, that’s about 1,500 solar cells at work. That means that the Solar Impulse collects enough solar energy to power about 7.7 American homes let’s say for the average lifetime of a solar panel, oh about 25+ years. Not too shabby.
On to the globe!
The Solar Impulse parked in the hangar at JFK is officially called the HB-SIA prototype, and its sole purpose is reportedly to demonstrate the feasibility of non-fueled flights. Not that anyone sees commercial airplanes running on solar anytime soon, but the applications may work in other circumstances. One of interest, for example, would be to power jets at use in war, where their landing to refuel can be pretty risky.
What’s next for the dynamic team behind the Solar Impulse? The pioneering pilots and their team of engineers and multi-million-dollar sponsors are already at work on Solar Impulse 2, called HB-SIB. Information gathered during the pioneering flight of the first plane is being applied to the new one, its sights set on circumnavigating the globe by 2015!
