Solar Impulse 2 completes round-the-world trip
Print Edition
SWISS pilot Andre Borschberg lives by the rallying cry of “making the impossible possible,” and now he and his compatriot Bertrand Piccard have done just that.
The pair completed the first round-the-world flight with a fully sun-powered plane, Solar Impulse 2, when Piccard landed in Abu Dhabi yesterday and wrapped up a journey that started 16 months ago.
During their odyssey, the two pilots alternated at the controls of the single-seat plane, with Borschberg in the cockpit for the longest leg of the journey.
With his 8,924km flight from Japan to Hawaii last year, which lasted 118 hours, he entered aviation history with the world’s longest uninterrupted flight.
The 63-year-old smashed the previous record for the longest non-stop solo flight of 76 hours and 45 minutes set by US adventurer Steve Fossett in 2006.
It was far longer from his first sky-shattering flight. He previously carried out the first-ever day and night flight in a solar aircraft, flying Solar Impulse 1 for 26 hours straight in 2010.
Borschberg has described his Pacific crossing as “an interior journey” and an “extraordinary occasion to discover myself.”
Alone in the cockpit, Borschberg could only sit or lie down and could sleep for no more than 20 minutes at a time, wearing a vibrating armband to wake him up in case of any anomaly.
He attributes his mental strength, which has been vital when flying solo for days on end, to yoga and meditation, which he usually practises in the garden of his home in Nyon, on the shores of Lake Geneva.
But he also practised in the cockpit of Solar Impulse 2, transforming his tiny bench into a yoga mat and using specialized postures custom-tailored for him by his personal yogi, Sanjeev Bhanot.
Born in Zurich, Borschberg began dreaming of flying and of pushing boundaries as a young child. He trained as a Swiss army pilot, learning to fly a range of jets and other aircraft. He also earned a degree in mechanics and thermodynamics from the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland, followed by master’s degrees in management studies at MIT in the United States.
After working as a fighter pilot, Borschberg entered the civilian sphere in 1983, taking a job as a consultant for McKinsey out of Zurich, New York and Tokyo. He later launched two internet start-ups and co-founding a company in the field of microprocessor memories.
Borschberg, a married father of three, says that it was “serendipity” that brought him and Piccard together in 2003.
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