Bertrand Piccard's Big Hydrogen Adventure – hydrogen fuel-cell aircraft

Summary

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 nonstop in a balloon, calledBreitling Orbiter 3. Then he and André Borschberg, a Swiss entrepreneur and pilot, were the 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 in psychiatry and established a psychiatric practice before a chance opportunity led to a sideline in ballooning. Invited to participate as copilot in a transatlantic 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 Ea...