Bertrand Piccard’s Big Hydrogen Adventure – He’ll fly around the world in a hydrogen fuel cell aircraft
Few explorers have reached the heights, literally and figuratively, that Bertrand Piccard has. He is the quintessential modern explorer, for whom every big mission has a purpose, which generally boils down to environmental and climate-change awareness.
In 1999 he was the first person to circumnavigate the globe non-stop in a balloon, called Breitling Orbiter 3. Then he and André Borschberg, a Swiss entrepreneur and pilot, were first to fly around the world, in stages, in a solar airplane called Solar Impulse. Now he’s in the midst of what looks like his most technologically ambitious mission yet: to fly around the planet in a green-hydrogen fuel-cell aircraft. Planned for 2028, this trip would be the first nonstop zero-emission circumnavigation in human history.
It’s easy to see how this is the logical next step in Piccard’s remarkable career. And yet there was nothing straightforward about the early stages of the journey that got him here. The path to becoming one of the world’s most celebrated aeronaut-aviators began with hang gliding, which Piccard took up in his teens to confront his fear of heights. He did so with a zeal that earned him the European hang-gliding aerobatics championship in 1985.
Still, it would be years before Piccard joined the family business of exploration. In the mid-1990s he earned an MD degree in psychiatry and established a psychiatric practice before a chance opportunity led to a sideline in ballooning. Invited to participate as copilot in a trans-Atlantic balloon race—which he and his teammate won—he immediately became seized with the idea of being the first to circumnavigate the globe in a balloon.
Such a project resonated with his family’s history. His grandfather, Auguste Piccard, was a physics professor-turned-inventor who built the first pressurized aluminum gondola. It enabled him and a colleague to be the first people hoisted into the stratosphere, by a hydrogen balloon, in 1931. Besides being the first person to see the curvature of the Earth, Auguste was the inspiration for the Professor Cuthbert Calculus character in The Adventures of Tintin series of comic novels.
Later, Auguste invented and built the first bathyscaphe. In 1946 he was joined by his son, Jacques, a marine engineer, with whom he made a series of record descents. This work culminated in the Trieste, in which Jacques and a U.S. Navy Lieutenant, Don Walsh, plumbed the depths of the Mariana Trench in 1960, becoming the first people to descend 10,916 meters to reach the deepest spot on Earth.
In an homage to the exploring spirit of multiple generations of Piccards, the captain of the Enterprise starship in various reinventions of the science-fiction series Star Trek starting in 1987 was named Jean-Luc Picard.
IEEE Spectrum interviewed Bertrand Piccard at a pivotal moment in the hydrogen-powered aircraft project, with the plane, called Climate Impulse, about 40 percent built. Piccard spoke about the contributions to the Climate Impulse project of his corporate sponsors, including Airbus, and about why he’s confident that hydrogen will eventually succeed as an aviation fuel.
This transcript has been lightly edited for concision and clarity.
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