Pilot Stephen Ptachek waved his farewell hand and headed for the English Channel. After 5 hours and 23 minutes, covering a distance of 370 kilometers, the aircraft landed at a British Air Force base in the city of Manston on the southwest coast of Britain.
If the hero of ancient legends, Icarus, knew about this journey, he would have burned with envy, for this historic (and record-breaking range) flight was made by the Challenger aircraft using only solar energy.
On hospitable British soil he was met by fifty-year-old engineer Paul McCready. It was he who designed a unique aircraft, which he called "Challenger" ("Calling Out").
In this project, Paul used fifteen thousand photovoltaic cells that convert the sun's rays into electricity. He placed the photocells on the surfaces of the bearing planes with a span of fourteen meters. The photocells were developed for space satellites and were obtained by Paul from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. During the flight, they generated approximately two thousand seven hundred watts, that is, less than four horsepower, which is one thirteenth the power of a small gasoline-powered aircraft. However, this energy was enough to power the electric motor that turned the propeller. The aircraft's fuselage was made of lightweight plastic materials. The mass of the apparatus was one hundred kilograms, and the pilot himself weighed forty kilograms less.
McCready told media reporters that the Challenger flight proved the vast potential and enormous promise of solar energy.
McCready's correctness was confirmed by the rapid development of solar flying vehicles. In 1990, an American, Eric Raymond, flew across the United States from west to east in a plane he called the Sun Seeker. Eric was not embarrassed that he had to make twenty stops on the way, and the flight itself lasted more than two months. The Sunseeker, equipped with silicon solar panels, weighed ninety kilograms.
In 2001, a solar drone called Helios, designed specifically for NASA and having a wingspan of more than seventy meters, managed to rise to a height of thirty kilometers.
In 2005, a small unmanned aerial vehicle with a wingspan of five meters made the first flight lasting fifty hours. Due to the energy accumulated by the batteries during the daytime, the aircraft was able to continue its flight at night.
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In 2008, a solar plane was built and tested, which flew eighty hours. The device weighed thirty kilograms, the wingspan was twelve meters, and the flight height exceeded eighteen kilometers.
In the development of aircraft that use the energy of our luminary, a doctor, traveler, businessman and record-holder Bertrand Picard played a huge role. He attributed his successful experiments in airspace exploration and his frantic thirst for adrenaline to genes.
His grandfather, the famous physicist Auguste Piccard, was a close friend of Einstein and Marie Curie. He was known as an ardent advocate of aviation development and built a unique stratospheric balloon. In addition, a deep-sea bathyscaphe was destroyed. In the early thirties, he rose to a height of fifteen kilometers in a balloon of his own design and became the first person in the world to see with his own eyes the curvature of the earth's surface.
Then Auguste rushed into the depths of the ocean and made several dives in the bathyscaphe. His son Jacques continued the family business and became the conqueror of the Mariana Trench, plunging to a depth of eleven kilometers in a bathyscaphe designed by his father.
Born in 1958, Bertrand became interested in flying machines as a child. At the age of twenty, he became the European champion in parachuting and was the first to fly the Swiss-Italian Alps on a motor hang-glider.
Imperceptibly, the "airy" hobby has also become a professional laboratory for him. Interested in the behavior of people in extreme situations, Picard received a degree in psychology and defended his dissertation on the topic of human behavior in extreme situations.
Then the sky called out to him again. He competed in prestigious hot air balloon races and aspired to new records. Failures and problems did not stop him.
In March 1999, he took off in a hot air balloon in Zurich, and landed twenty days later in Egypt, breaking several world records. After that, Bertrand wrote three books about his adventures and became a welcome guest at numerous conferences and seminars.
In early 2003, the tireless explorer announced an ambitious new undertaking. He decided to create a manned solar-powered aircraft capable of circling the globe. This is how the Solar Impulse project was born.
Picard's partner was the Swiss pilot and businessman Andre Borschberg. A chartered engineer, he holds a professional pilot's license and has been involved in many high-profile ventures.
In November 2003, Picard and Borschberg carried out preliminary studies that confirmed the fundamental engineering feasibility of implementing the Picard concept. In July 2010, André Borschberg made a historic round-the-clock flight in a new solar aircraft model.
After landing, he expressed confidence that in the coming years, their model will be refined and will be able to fly around the globe. And Bertrand Picard said: "We are confident that the development of solar aircraft will lead to the fact that in the future air passengers will fly not on kerosene, but on the energy of our star!"