Let’s run the world with clean technologies
Game-changing clean technologies make the impossible possible! In July 2016, Solar Impulse, the first ever zero-emission aircraft powered exclusively by solar energy, landed in Abu Dhabi and completed its world tour. Since the take-off in March 2015, pilots Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg traveled more than 40,000 km, flew across two oceans and shattered eight world records.
In 2015 started the attempt of the First Round-The-World Solar Flight, from Abu Dhabi to Hawaii, already achieving the longest solo solar flight ever achieved in aviation history. In 2016, Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg, our two Pilots and Founders, completed the first circumnavigation of the globe with no fuel. With their solar aircraft, a flying laboratory full of clean technologies, they flew 40,000 km to promote the use of renewable energies and energy efficiency on the ground, for a better quality of life. Across the Round-The-World flight, the team overcame technical, human and operational challenges that had never been faced before.
Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg set out and accomplished something that still seems impossible today: the First Round-The-World Solar Flight, powered only by the sun, with no fuel or polluting emissions.
We are extremely proud and honored to have been a partner in this visionary and far-flung project over the past decade. From the beginning, the concept of designing, building and flying a zero-emission aircraft around the world totally aligned with our own unwavering commitment to develop transformative clean technologies that ease the world’s dependency on carbon-emitting fossil fuels.
We also saw it as yet another chance to demonstrate chemistry’s ability to “make the impossible possible” and we had to be a part of it. Since 2003, our dedicated teams of scientists, engineers, dreamers and innovators have collaborated closely with like-minded individuals from Solar Impulse and leading technological partners to do away with convention. Instead we developed clean-sheet solutions that dramatically improve the energy chain, enhance the structure and reduce the weight of the solar-powered aircraft – all crucial elements that made this historic flight a success.
Solar Impulse’s true journey, of course, has no finish line. The message it carries is one of enduring innovation, possibility, persistence and conviction. Tomorrow’s answers are within our reach today. All we need to do is ask for more…
