Bertrand Piccard is looking for 1,000 environmental ideas that make money: and he's almost done it
Isabelle Kumar chats to Bertrand Piccard, the inventor, adventurer and eco-warrior about how he's helping to make the planet a greener place.
I have met Bertrand Piccard a couple of times previously for short interviews and have always wanted to delve deeper into his life which is so rich in excitement and achievement. I was delighted to have the opportunity to do so for Disrupted. We met up in his hometown of Lausanne.
It was a grey damp day when we met. Bertrand Piccard strolled in dressed in black, looking more like a high class architect than a world renowned explorer. His piercing blue eyes sparkle with an intensity I have rarely encountered, his enthusiasm captivated myself and the crew at our shoot. What’s more, he is a good talker and a likeable fellow.
A family business
Adventure is in Bertrand Piccard’s blood. His father and grandfather were both renowned explorers; his role models he tells me were “astronauts, explorers, divers, environmentalists”.
He identifies immediately with the premise of the programme as for him, disruption is at the heart of who he is. Being an explorer, he tells me, “is the desire to be disruptive. An explorer is somebody who is not satisfied with the status quo, with what he sees, with what he has.”
Piccard’s first major endeavour was a record breaking flight around the world in a hot air balloon: “It was 20 days non-stop in the air, 45,000 kilometres, the longest flight ever in the entire history of aviation.” It was a journey that could have ended in failure, at worst death. “We landed with 40 kilos of liquid propane out of the 3700 kilos I had at the start. So I thought, if I want to do better, I have to change this paradigm. I have to be disruptive again and do something without fuel.”
Solar Impulse
That was how the idea of Solar Impulse was born. Bertrand Picard teamed up with André Borschberg, a pilot, engineer and fellow Swiss explorer. It took more than 10 years to come up with a viable aircraft powered only by the sun, a feat nearly every aviation expert had written off as impossible. In 2015 they took off for a 42,000 km journey. 505 days later they had made it around the world.
The historic flight was not only fuelled by the sun, but by a driving imperative to prove to the world the full potential of environmentally sound technologies. “I wanted to prove that clean technologies and renewable energies could achieve the impossible, this is basically what I wanted to show and the disruption of having a solar powered aeroplane flying without fuel at night with solar energy”.
The voyage also taught Piccard about himself - “I learned to be perseverant because I was very impatient in the past when I was younger and Solar Impulse was three times longer than I thought and five times more expensive. So I had to really work it hard to succeed. I learnt that you should never be afraid to fail.”
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