When I flew around the world non-stop in a hot air balloon with my friend Brian Jones, we took off with 3.7 tonnes of liquid propane. After 20 days, we landed with 40 kilos. So when we say “the sky is the limit,” it’s wrong. It’s the fuel. I wanted to change that paradigm and see what we could do with no fuel at all. That was the dream of the Solar Impulse project: to fly around the world on a solar-powered airplane that can fly almost perpetually. The world of aviation told me it was impossible. So I had to turn to someone who did not know it was impossible, which was a shipyard. (Yes, the first airplane to fly around the world with no fuel was built by a shipyard.)
It’s a very important message: It proves that if you want innovation and a revolution in the way we think, you have to get out of the system. You have to find people who see our reality from a completely different angle. And then you need to understand that “the impossible” is only confined by the way we are thinking. These are the types of things I was thinking when I was flying the Solar Impulse. When I was crossing the Atlantic from New York to Spain, that was three days and three nights in the cockpit. I knew that I didn’t really need to land. The only reason to land was when there was bad weather in front of you, or to give the cockpit to my friend, André Borschberg, because we promised that we would share this single-seat cockpit. Otherwise, with no reason to […]