“I
am proud what we’ve been able to accomplish together,
all of us, from the engineers that have built a
fantastic airplane, to the Mission team experts that
found a safe but successful strategy to the ground crew
who had to operate in challenging conditions and
multimedia team who under any circumstance brought the
message of the project to the public. The world’s first
intercontinental solar-powered flight would have never
happened without the fantastic support provided by all
people that crossed HB-SIA’s way.”
Bertrand Piccard, Initiator and Chairman of the Solar
Impulse Program, said as the ground crew opened the
canopy. “The success of this mission was not only
aeronautical: it also stands in the quantity of positive
emotions we managed to bring to the cause of renewable
energies.” This intercontinental flight
campaign, under High Patronage of His Highness The King
Mohammed VI and upon invitation of the Moroccan Agency
for Solar Energy (Masen), allowed Solar Impulse together
with Masen to raise awareness about solar energy’s
potential and about Morocco’s pioneering solar plan
whose goal is to build the world’s largest thermosolar
plant in the region of Ouarzazate. This month of events
in Morocco underlined Solar Impulse’s and Masen’s common
message to invest in innovative projects today for job
creation and sustainable growth while also decreasing
dependency on fossil fuels.
“This Moroccan mission was a success from all angles as
well as an extraordinary human experience. Apart from
the interactions with the extremely qualified and
multidisciplinary Solar Impulse team, this event was an
occasion to share our convictions, our values and our
engagement with national and international communities
thanks to the mobilization of thousands of people during
the events we organized on the runways of Rabat-Salé and
Ouarzazate and thanks to the millions of viewers through
the media.” said Mustafa Bakkoury, President of Masen.
Solar Impulse HB-SIA, the first airplane designed to fly
day and night without requiring fuel and without
producing carbon emissions, demonstrates the enormous
potential held by new technologies in terms of energy
savings and renewable energy production. Seven years of
intensive work, calculations and tests by a team of 70
people and 80 partners have contributed to producing
this revolutionary carbon fiber airplane, with a
wingspan as wide as that of an Airbus A340 (63.4m) and a
weight equivalent to that of an average family car.
It is the largest airplane of its weight ever to
have been built. The 12,000 solar cells integrated
into the wing supply four electric motors (maximum
power 10CV each) with renewable energy and charge
the 400kg lithium polymer batteries during the day,
enabling the aircraft to fly at night. The Solar
Impulse project is supported, among others, by:
Solvay, Omega, Deutsche Bank and Schindler as
Principal Partners; Bayer Material Science and
Altran as Official Partners; EPFL (Lausanne Federal
Institute of Technology) as Official Scientific
Consultant and Dassault-Aviation as Aviation
Consultant.
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