Two pilots are making a fresh attempt to complete their round-the-world, solar-powered flight. With only one person on board at a time, each will have to endure little sleep, space and other perils of a road less travelled.
Bertrand Piccard’s preflight check on Thursday onboard the Solar Impulse 2 includes monitoring weather patterns from Hawaii to the US mainland, checking the connection between solar panels and the battery and ensuring he applied his anti-hair growth cream.
Solar Impulse 2 is continuing its attempt to make an around-the-world flight without fuel.
The plane was grounded in Hawaii last autumn after experiencing battery problems.
In the unpressurised cockpit of a plane that is built on a strict ethos of efficiency, every opportunity to reduce Solar Impulse’s weight is taken.
That includes factoring in minuscule details, such as creating a better seal on oxygen masks by reducing any chance of a five o’clock shadow on the Swiss pilot’s face.
As the only pilot flying a plane that will take days to make the record-breaking flight from Hawaii to the West Coast of the US, Piccard will have to endure temperatures swinging from 35°C to minus 20°C, with less than 30 per cent oxygen, at 8,700 metres in the air.
To achieve the feat, the plane’s engineers, who Piccard and co-pilot Andre Borschberg have called the real heroes, have designed gear similar to what mountaineers wear on an attempt to reach the top of Everest.
The only difference is, the pilots need to change in a space no larger than a refrigerator.
In fact, they need to do everything in that space, including sleep, eat, change and go to the toilet.
“So the first question is how to get to sleep very quickly and the way we did it is to use meditation and breathing techniques,” Borschberg said in January last year before taking off from Abu Dhabi on the first leg of the flight.
But Piccard is planning to nod off using self-hypnosis by counting while staring at his thumb.
Both techniques call for them to fall asleep quickly and they will need it. They have only a 20-minute window to rest.
“This is not much, so he has to be really focused on his different tasks on the plane,” said Dr Raphael Heinzer, a sleep specialist at Le Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois, in Lausanne, Switzerland.
The pilots are scheduled to take 20-minute naps throughout the day because that is the maximum time the plane can be left unattended.
When added up, it amounts to two or three hours of sleep a day, or about 15 hours for the entire trip. Typically, the human body begins to suffer after 24 hours of sleep deprivation.
A University of California, San Diego study shows that sleepier subjects displayed more activity in the prefrontal cortex, or an area of the brain responsible for memory and reasoning.
This was interpreted to show that the sleepier the person was, the harder it was to do simple tasks, let alone fly a fuel-less plane.
Nourishment will come easier. Nestle Research is providing 2.4 kilograms of food and 2.5 litres of water a day.
“We developed special food because the temperature of the cockpit will vary between minus 20°C to 35°C,” Borschberg says.
The food has to be developed specifically to withstand these extreme temperature.
Nestle worked with each pilot over two months to determine their food preferences.
Aside from providing them with enough calories, the researchers acknowledged the emotional association of food and provided snacks outside of the nutritional requirements to help boost morale.
The food is stored in pouches, along with specially designed with beads that create heat through a chemical reaction sparked when water is added.
nalwasmi@thenational.ae
