November Updates

Wednesday 4th November 2015

The interruption of the flight around the world is in many ways quite beneficial. This flight is not a race against the clock. The goal is to demonstrate what is in fact feasible and to explore and find the way to do it. 

When we fly over the ocean many days and many nights in a row, we cannot cheat: every day we need to collect enough energy to fly and make it through the night. Every night we have to save energy to ensure we are still in the air the following morning at sun rise. The level of energy remaining in the battery in the morning is close to 10%. Remember how you feel when you see the level of the battery of your mobile phone getting red! This is the same stress we experience!

The break in the mission gives us time to do many things. Bertrand is very busy trying to secure funding to allow us to continue. He is also actively  preparing our involvement at COP 21, the Paris Global Climate Change Conference

As for myself, I am focusing on 2 fronts. first making sure we will be ready next year to continue our flight around the world from hawaii to abu Dhabi. This includes preparing and fully testing the airplane by replacing the batteries which have overheated during our flight to Hawaii. Let me remind you that when leaving Japan we had to do a test flight followed immediately by the 5 days 5 nights mission flight. The airplane was never designed for that. It was designed to do either a test flight then land or a mission flight alone. But not both together. The heavy airline traffic in Japan did not allow us to conduct 2 separate flights and we had no time to modify the airplane before hand! That’s the risk of exploration missions. You never know what could happen! Second I am preparing our future in terms of technology development.  More about that that in my next blog!