Piccard spirit takes flight down famous family tree
GENEVA: For Swiss pilot Bertrand Piccard, adventure really is in the blood. By flying between continents in a solar-powered plane, the explorer has again propelled himself into the record books where two generations of his family have also secured a place.
Piccard’s grandfather, physics professor Auguste (1884-1962), is credited with making the first exploration of the stratosphere, climbing 16km in a hot-air balloon in 1931.
Turning his attention from the skies to the bottom of the ocean, the man on whom Tintin creator Hergé modelled his likeable Professor Calculus went on to invent the bathyscaphe, a deep-sea submersible allowing man to plumb the depths of the seas as never before. His son Jacques, Bertrand’s father, took up the technology and performed, along with US navyman Don Walsh, the world’s deepest dive in 1960, dropping 10.9km to the floor of the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific.
Not until earlier this year, more than half a century later, was the feat repeated by Titanic director and ocean enthusiast James Cameron.
It was through his explorer father that Piccard junior was able to meet many of his childhood heroes, including Charles Lindbergh, the first man to fly solo across the Atlantic.
“I learnt so much from what my father and grandfather did, the pioneering and exploring spirit. I want to pass that on to my children,” the father of three said in Rabat yesterday, the day after landing his solar plane in the Moroccan capital.
His fascination with air travel started with hang-gliding and in the 1980s Piccard became the first person to cross the SwissItalian Alps in a microlight.
The trained psychiatrist returned to the family tradition of hot-air ballooning in 1992 when he was recruited by the Belgian Wim Verstraeten to take part – and win – the first transatlantic balloon race.
In 1999 Piccard, accompanied by the Englishman Brian Jones, went a step further and completed the first non-stop balloon circumnavigation of the globe in a little less than 20 days.
Now aged 54, the Lausanne-born adven- turer is again testing man’s travel boundaries just as his grandfather and father did before him.
On Tuesday, he completed the 19-hour transcontinental solar flight from Spain to Morocco.
“I can tell you it was one of the most beautiful flights of my life. I have been dreaming for 10 years of travelling from one continent to another without a drop of fuel,” Piccard said.
In 2014, Piccard will embark on his most-daunting mission yet: taking his sunpowered craft Solar Impulse on a roundthe-world trip without using any fuel.
As well as sating his adventurous impulses, Piccard is also flying the flag for renewable energy. – Sapa-AFP