Is this starting aviation’s future?
Designers of a new solar airplane are preparing for its first big endurance test, writes Bruce Newman. No monkeying about for chimps in teams
Bertrand Piccard was flying from Morocco to Spain last year – finishing another highly successful test of Solar Impulse, the revolutionary airplane he helped design that gets its power from the sun – when he made a profoundly disturbing discovery: He was flying backwards.
At 1590 kilograms, Solar Impulse weighs less than a Hyundai, and its four motors each generate only 10 horsepower, about the same as a motor scooter. Its trim body design makes the plane highly susceptible to headwinds, which at that moment meant Piccard and his pterodactyl-shaped solar array were at 8200 metres, going in reverse.
‘‘That was an interesting experience, quite strange to live,’’ Piccard said last week at the plane’s first public appearance, inside Moffett Airfield’s historic Hangar 2.
If the winds are at its back, that fate will not befall Solar Impulse when it embarks on its most ambitious journey on May 1, setting out across America on an adventure that’s not scheduled to finish until early July at New York’s JFK Airport. That’s not far from Roosevelt Field on Long Island where Charles Lindbergh took off in 1927 on aviation’s first trans- Atlantic solo flight.
‘‘This airplane could do it nonstop,’’ said co-pilot and project chief executive Andre Borschberg, ‘‘but because the pilot is not as sustainable as the technology, we have limited ourselves to 24-hour flight duration.’’
The plane isn’t really that slow – stops that could last 10 days are planned in four cities along the way – but even with the ability to fly day and night using only the sun’s power, it’s no speed demon.
With the wind at its back, the plane cruises at 56kmh, about half the speed of the airship Hindenburg.
If all goes well during its first big endurance test, Solar Impulse will attempt to circumnavigate the globe in 2015. That trip will require at least one nonstop stint of five days and extremely nervous nights over the Pacific. The cockpit can only accommodate one pilot at a time, so Borschberg said he will use meditation and Piccard will hypnotise himself while the plane flies on auto-pilot.
The plane looks like something you might install on your roof, although if all goes well during test flights over the San Francisco Bay area that begin next week, it won’t actually end up there.
It’s basically a giant wing with a glider’s fuselage and a porta-potty attached. That’s where the pilot sits in chilly solitude.
From wingtip to wingtip, Solar Impulse has a girth wider than a jumbo jetliner, and yet everything else about it is meant to be lean and mean. It draws all its power from 12,000 solar cells, each the thickness of a human hair, with the energy stored in a lithium polymer battery nearly identical to the one that powers the Tesla Model S.
At the public rollout, an introductory video stalled briefly and when it resumed, Piccard’s voice was sped up as if he had inhaled helium.
A balloonist who circled the planet in 1999, Piccard is a natural born adventurer, following his grandfather Auguste, a renowned balloonist, and father Jacques, who in 1960 became the first to explore the Mariana Trench in a submarine.
‘‘When I was a child, I was reading books about exploration, about aviation, about the conquest of space,’’ he said. His family moved to the United States because of his father’s work in 1968, a year before Apollo 11 landed on the moon, propelling Bertrand into suborbital flights of fancy.
‘‘Then I saw that the reality was much better than the dream.’’
To bring the decade-long dream to life, the project’s co-founders have assembled 80 sponsors, among them Schindler, the world’s largest manufacturer of elevators and escalators. An executive from the company compared Piccard and Borschberg to the Wright brothers, just before using the press gathering to announce the Schindler Solar Elevator.
Even in the darkened hangar, the sun always seemed to be shining on Solar Impulse, with one speaker after another extolling its promise. But the technology has aroused at least modest scepticism.
‘‘This is something to capture the imagination of kids, of innovators,’’ said Ben Lenail, director of business development at AltaDevices, a company that manufactures thin solar cells with a far more practical application – powering drones already used by the military.
‘‘You have to have everything go right. It’s a beautiful dream, but in terms of practical application, I think we’re still about 15 years away,’’ Lenail said.
Piccard was asked if Solar Impulse – which is already being redesigned for the trip around the world in two years – is the airplane of the future.
‘‘It would be crazy to answer yes, and stupid to answer no. Because today, we cannot imagine having a solar-powered airplane with 200 passengers. But in 1903,’’ he said, referring to the Wright brothers’ first flight, ‘‘it was exactly the same. And when Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic, he was alone on board, in an airplane full of gasoline. We don’t know what’s going to happen in the future. But we have to start.’’
Just like enterprising humans, chimpanzees can be good team players to achieve their goals, according to a new study. The findings, published in Biology Letters, offer a glimpse into the possible origins of human co-operative behaviour.
With the lure of a juicy grape before them and two specialised tools in hand, chimps were able to work in pairs and free the fruit from a complex trap, according to a pair of European researchers working at the Sweetwaters Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Kenya.
‘‘Chimpanzees not only co-ordinate different roles, but they also know which particular action the partner needs to perform,’’ the authors wrote, arguing that ‘‘many of chimpanzees’ limitations in collaboration are, perhaps, more motivational than cognitive’’.
Researchers have debated whether chimps can work co-operatively for common purpose. Some have described their group hunts in the wild as co-ordinated, while others looking at different populations say they are haphazard.
To answer this question, 12 chimps were paired up and placed around a sealed, see-through box with eight grapes in it.
In order to get the grape out, one chimpanzee would have to insert a thin stick through a slit in the back and rake the grapes over to a platform, which the second chimp would cause to tilt using a thick stick – thus dropping the grapes into reach for both team-mates.
One chimp was given both tools, and then had to decide what to do with them. Some chimps were quicker studies than others. But once a pair successfully shared a tool once, they transferred tools 97 per cent of the time and successfully grabbed the grapes in 86 per cent of the trials, the authors said.