Time Frame: The flight of a solar future

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  Photo: Olga Stefatou

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There’s nothing like an aerial photograph for putting Abu Dhabi’s development in perspective. Seventeen months ago, Solar Impulse 2 (Si2), the world’s first aircraft to fly day and night without a drop of fuel, successfully accomplished a test flight in the skies above the capital.

Transported from Switzerland on a cargo plane and reassembled at Al Bateen Executive Airport, the site of Abu Dhabi’s first purpose-built airstrip, Si2 then soared over the city on wings larger than those of a Boeing 747.

By capturing Si2 in-flight, Olga Stefatou unwittingly became part of a select band of photographers who have recorded Abu Dhabi from the air, a tradition that began in the late 1950s when aerial photographers first started to capture what was then little more than a palm frond settlement where aircraft landed on a runway made from a stretch of compacted sand.

Featuring Abu Dhabi’s oldest international hotel, the now diminutive 10-storey Hilton Abu Dhabi, which opened in 1973, and its newest, the Dh1 billion, 563-room Fairmont Marina Resort, whose incomplete towers dominate the capital’s Breakwater (top right), Stefatou’s photograph is also a record of the city’s urban development.

The fact that the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company headquarters dominates the vista tells us everything we need to know about the engine that has made that development possible.

Si2 is expected back in the capital this week, by which point it will have completed its own remarkable journey, the first round-the-world solar flight, reaffirming Abu Dhabi’s global ambitions, and its place in the annals of the history of flight.

* Nick Leech