20 Years until Business-Class Normal
On December 17, 1903, Wilbur and Orville Wright flew the first powered flight in an aircraft. They took the Wright Flyer to a height of 10 feet and flew 852 feet at a speed of about 7 miles per hour. Little did they know…
About 20 years later, in 1923, Lieutenants Oakley Kelly and John Macready of the Army Air Service made the first non-stop coast-to-coast flight in the United States. They flew from New York to San Diego. They made the flight in a little over a day.
In 1942, a little less than 20 years after the flight of Kelly and Macready, Howard Hughes made a trip from Newark, New Jersey to Los Angeles, California. He was a little speedier. The daylong flight of 20 years earlier took Hughes about 7½ hours.
Five years later, West Virginia native Chuck Yeager flew the Glamorous Glennis faster than the speed of sound. At 70,140 feet, he became the fastest pilot with the highest achieved altitude in history.
In 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world’s first satellite. They followed it four years later by sending Yuri Gagarin into space. By the end of the 1960’s, we had put a man on the moon.
20 years after manned spaceflight, Bryan Allen took one small step backwards. He took off, completed a figure-8 course, and landed in an aircraft that he piloted, and was powered by…him. A bicycle enthusiast, Allen pedaled his way into history. He later pedaled a similar aircraft across the English Channel.
All of this brings us to the dreams of one Bertrand Piccard. First, though, you need to understand his family tree.
Piccard’s father was Jacques Piccard. He was a noted engineer who took the design for high altitude balloons and sent them in another direction. His Trieste reached the bottom of the Challenger Deep, the deepest part of the Mariana Trench. He and Don Walsh of the United States Navy were the only men to have seen the Deep, and the Trieste remains the only manned vehicle to have made the trip. It was seven miles beneath the surface of the ocean.
Jacques may have gotten the bug from HIS father. Auguste Piccard was a physics professor with a thing for balloons. Auguste and his twin brother Jean Felix designed a pressurized capsule that would allow them to travel higher than anyone had ever been in a balloon. In the 1930’s he travelled to 75,459 feet. He became the first man to see for himself the curvature of the earth.
All of this comes back to Bertrand. In 1999 he piloted the Breitling Orbiter (have you seen Jetman? Those Breitling guys have a thing for flight!) in the first around-the-world continuous balloon flight. His latest fancy of flight is the Solar Impulse. It is a solar-powered aircraft and his goal is to fly it non-stop around the world. It uses solar technology, the latest battery technology, and physics to be able to gather energy when needed, expend it when needed, and store it for when needed.
Clouds? Still flying. Night? Still flying.
He’s already managed to keep the thing aloft for over 26 hours (about the length of time for the first American cross-country flight in 1923). And his vision is quite simple. To “demonstrate that progress is possible using clean energy”.
Bertrand likes to point out that his goal will not be achieved overnight.
When you look at the milestones of aviation, huge leaps were made over the span of about 20 years. From the Wright Brothers to Howard Hughes to Chuck Yeager to Yuri Gagarin. Giant leaps for mankind.
What Bertrand Piccard is doing does not require a new energy source. Solar has been around for years. He isn’t even the first to have flown a solar-powered aircraft. What is perhaps more important, is what he is doing for clean energy. We’ve waited more than 20 years for his flight.
Isn’t it time for clean energy to make the giant leap from Jules Verne fantasy to business-class normal?