Flight_International 28Jan2020

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ENVIRONMENT

38 | Flight International | 28 January-3 February 2020

With Solar Impulse, Bertrand Piccard showed that clean

technology can deliver a technical triumph; now his mission

is to convince business that going green makes money

Logical and

ecological

PILAR WOLFSTELLER GENEVA

S

wiss aviation pioneer and climate

advocate Bertrand Piccard has a pow-

erful and urgent message for the avia-

tion and aerospace industries: inno-

vate quickly, or risk losing your business to

the realities of climate change. In the era of

“flygskam”, or flight shaming, and a younger

generation’s heightened awareness of the real-

ity of a warming planet, it is up to industry

players to embrace new ideas and transforma-

tional technologies – in everything from air-

craft fuel burn to the cabin waste they discard.

The structural and operational changes

will not only be good for the environment but

also, says Piccard, for business. “Environ-

mental protection has finally become profita-

ble,” he says. “So even for people who deny

climate change, it would be logical as much as

ecological to replace what is polluting with

what is clean, because it creates more jobs and

profit than the old, outdated and inefficient

technologies.”

Piccard belongs to a dynasty of notable ex-

plorers and adventurers. His grandfather, Au-

guste, was a high-altitude balloonist, re-

searching Earth’s upper atmosphere and

measuring cosmic radiation. His father,

Jacques, was an oceanographer and undersea

explorer, whose “Challenger Deep” mission

reached the deepest known point of the

earth’s seabed in the Pacific Ocean’s Mariana

Trench in 1960.

Bertrand, a psychologist by training, con-

tinued the family tradition of scientific

achievement, completing the first nonstop cir-

cumnavigation of the globe in the hot air bal-

loon Breitling Orbiter 3 in 1999. Almost 20

years later, he circled the planet again, this

time in a solar-powered aircraft called Solar

Impulse 2.

After finishing the 21,600nm (40,000km)

journey in 2016 – the first by a fixed-wing air-

craft powered only by the sun – Piccard began

to build a legacy for the project. He launched

the Solar Impulse Foundation, a broad plat-

form to study and promote sustainable tech-

nology, as well as to encourage governments

to implement ambitious energy policies.

LASTING IMPACT

“The Solar Impulse airplane flight around the

world was an impactful symbol – we showed

what we can do with renewable energy and

clean technologies,” Piccard says. “After this

success I wanted to make it more practical

and easier for people to understand.”

Piccard launched his “1,000 solutions

to  protect the planet” challenge to collect,

select and label technologies, products or

systems that protect the environment, but at

the same time generate financial benefits and

secure jobs.

“I wanted to be able to speak the language

of the people we need to convince – the lan-

guage of job creation and profitability,”

he says. “Because if you only speak about pro-

tecting the environment to people who have

only very short-term interests, investments

and views, it’s useless.”

While the industry’s current sustainability

focus is primarily on alternative fuels,

Piccard points out there are numerous meas-

ures across every aspect of the aviation and

aerospace ecosystem that could bring signifi-

cant results. He cites three specific areas of

improvement: operational procedures,

technology and politics.

“If a jumbo jet makes a constant-descent

approach rather than an incremental

approach, you can save 1t of kerosene for

every landing,” he says.

“If you have more direct routes across re-

gions, it would be profitable. Right now you

still have air traffic control areas who want to

keep their authority, so airplanes must fly

longer distances – and that makes it expen-

sive for everybody. Then you have the possi-

bility to bring airplanes to the runway

threshold with electric trailers rather than to

taxi on their own engine. All this is profita-

ble. Airports can be carbon neutral using

LED lamps and better building insulation –

this is profitable too.”

OFFSET EMISSIONS

However, jet fuel is aviation’s number-one

contributor to greenhouse gases, and several

airlines (including Air France and JetBlue)

recently announced that they will offset their

fleets’ emissions to become carbon neutral.

Delta Air Lines, Lufthansa and United Air-

lines have made investments in biofuels. In

this way, airlines have begun to reduce their

carbon footprint and move towards the indus-