Grounded pilots turn their attention to unmanned solar flight

At the end of his record-breaking solar-powered flight from Japan to Hawaii, Swiss pilot Andre Borschberg was counting down the minutes until he was back on the ground.

Early on in the flight, Borschberg and the team behind Solar Impulse 2 realized there were problems with the fuelless plane. The battery’s insulation system was preventing it from cooling down and an alert system intended to wake the pilot up in the case of an emergency had failed.

With four more days before Borschberg, flying in a one-man cockpit, was slated to land in Hawaii’s Kalaeloa airport, the team faced a difficult choice: turn around and try again after repairing the plane, or soldier on.

Borschberg says that the engineers on the team wanted him to turn around, but the decision was ultimately left up to him. He says that at the time, the choice to continue was surprisingly emotional. “The project is at risk, the airplane is at risk, and at the end my life is at risk as well,” he says by telephone from Hawaii. “It’s not a business decision anymore, it’s a life decision. The intensity is completely different.”

The team managed to keep the battery system working and found a workaround for the alert system that only allowed Borschberg to sleep during perfect flying weather. But two weeks after the plane landed in Hawaii, the team was forced to call off the next leg of the journey until at least April 2016.

However disappointing, the waiting period isn’t entirely negative. It allows time for Borschberg, as well as Bertrand Piccard, his co-pilot, to work on an idea that has been in the making, but has been largely overshadowed by Solar Impulse 2’s record-shattering achievements. The two are working on applying the solar technology to unmanned vehicles.

These unmanned flights would last upwards of six months at a time and would be at a higher altitude than any commercial flights. The planes could act much like satellites. Borschberg and Piccard imagine them providing wifi to remote areas, providing useful data for farmers, tracking climate change and helping rescue workers locate people in need.

All of this would be relatively cheap. And it wouldn’t pollute the atmosphere further. “There are great things to be done. This is a fantastic domain which we will develop greatly,” Borschberg says.

The Solar Impulse team — nearly 100 people — is in a race against huge companies like Facebook and Google, Borschberg says

Piccard says that he will spend the next eight months traveling to find new investors to fund the rest of the round-the-world trip, but will also be focusing on the possibility of high-altitude unmanned flights. His job will be convincing businesses the merits of investing in the opportunity.

“There has been a big contradiction between the ecology and the industry for the last 50 years,” he says. “And fortunately today there is a solution. The solution is clean technologies, renewable energy that is at the same time useful for the environment but also creates jobs, makes a profit and sustains economic growth.”

The proof, he says, is his team’s successful flight across the Pacific. So while the plane is stuck in Hawaii until spring, the delay may be a blessing.

Borschberg, meanwhile, is counting again. But this time, he’s counting down the minutes until he’s back in the air. Flying fuelless.