SolarImpulse i Dallas-Fort Worth

Early Thursday morning, the future landed at DFW Airport: a solar-powered airplane on a record-shattering sojourn

SolarImpulse Lands at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport

From a distance, it looked, well, exactly as advertised - like a UFO on the horizon, 200 feet of bright white lights spread across the early-morning skies over Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. As it floated in for a landing on runway 13L, it made no sound at all. It appeared to hover, then float, then shimmy slightly from side to side. Later, an onlooker would offer the perfect description of this heretofore unseen contraption: a Popsicle stick with the wings of a jetliner.

Bertrand Piccard, one in a long line of Piccards past (and future) who went looking for answers in the thin air

Only, it's much, much more: the SolarImpulse, the so-called "zero fuel airplane" whose wings are covered with some 12,000 monocrystalline silicon cells - solar panels, in other words, that store sunlight and make it possible to pilot the plane from here to there without a drop of anything.

"We could stay up till the next sunrise and capture the next rays of the rising sun to continue the flight," says its co-creator and co-pilot, Bertrand Piccard. "This is what's completely revolutionary."
Till now Piccard was best known as one half of the pioneering pair - with Brian Jones - who circumnavigated the globe, non-stop, in a balloon. Their travels were chronicled in the book Around the World in 20 Days. Now he's traveling across the U.S. - from San Francisco to Phoenix to Dallas to St. Louis to Washington D.C. to New York City at an average of 26 miles per hour - using his plane to sell the concept of a "Clean Generation" that can and will survive solely on renewable energy.
The trip from Phoenix to Dallas, which took some 18 hours, set the distance for a solar-powered flight. In other words, the future is here. It just doesn't go real fast.

The SolarImpulse, in the works since 2003, landed just after 1 a.m. Thursday at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. It was piloted by one man, Piccard's partner, Andre Borschberg, because only one person can fit inside its cramped cockpit. Borschberg hovered above DFW for hours, in the breezy, bumpy darkness, until the sky cleared of air traffic, lest any turbulence jostle the fragile craft. Upon landing Borschberg joked that he was on the lookout for good steakhouses, but couldn't espy any in the dark. He asked for suggestions. Many were given.

Piccard, who piloted the craft from San Francisco to Phoenix, is the perfect spokesman for this endeavor; his, after all, is the name-brand last name.

"Star Trek, you know Jean-Luc Picard? The captain of Enterprise? He is named after the twin brother of my grandfather," he says. He's referring to Jean Felix Piccard, the chemist-turned-balloon-maker, and his brother Auguste, the first person to touch the stratosphere in a balloon. "Star Trek used his name for the captain of Enterprise. So, actually, he's my great-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-nephew, because he's in the future. ...


Piccard greeting Borschberg upon the arrival of SolarImpulse early Thursday morning


"My grandfather was the first man to see the curvature of the earth with his own eyes. My father [Jacques] built the bathyscaphe with my grandfather and made the deepest dive in the Mariana Trench with Don Walsh in 1960. Charles Lindbergh I met at Cape Kennedy when I was a kid. Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man to climb Mount Everest, was a friend of my father's. I thought it was a normal way to live, to be an explorer. I have to say, I was disappointed when I was older to see a lot of people aren't explorers, that a lot of people are afraid of the unknown, are afraid of the question marks, and they want to reassure themselves with the old ways of thinking. I remember thinking, 'At least I'm not going to be like that. I'm going to be an explorer also.'"

The pair, and the support crew and filmmakers traveling with them, will be at the airport for several days; public viewings of the plane will take place Friday and Saturday. Check the website for available times. Even on the ground the plane is a sight to behold, a behemoth whose wingspan fills a runway yet looks as fragile as child's toy. Piccard says it will be the product he uses to sell the future.

"The team of SolarImpulse, we believe there are a lot of big challenges and problems to solve for the future, and we cannot solve them with old patterns of thinking," he says. "We need to leave the certitudes and common assumptions behind. But if we make a press conference about the psychology of pioneering, I'm not sure a lot of people would be interested. We have to show clear solutions, new technologies that really save energy. And SolarImpulse is, for us, the best example we can show. It's an airplane that raises the awareness of people, that attracts attention. Everybody is passionate about these new type of adventures, and this adventure is made possible only because we use renewable energy - a plane that flies almost forever day and night with no fuel."