Piccard, Bertrand

Bertrand Piccard, (born March 1, 1958, Lausanne, Switzerland), Swiss aviator who on March 20, 1999, with copilot Brian Jones, completed the first nonstop circumnavigation of the globe by balloon. The trip, begun by Piccard and Jones on March 1 aboard the Breitling Orbiter 3, took 19 days 21 hours 55 minutes to complete. Starting in the Swiss Alps, the balloon carried the pair over Europe, Africa, Asia, Central America, and the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.

Piccard, the captain of the Breitling Orbiter 3, was the grandson of Auguste Piccard, who was the first person to reach the stratosphere by balloon, and the son of Jacques Piccard, who designed and piloted bathyscaphes for deep-sea exploration. He became an expert hang-gliding pilot as a child and later piloted ultralight planes and hot-air balloons. Although he trained as a psychiatrist and established a practice in Lausanne, he continued to devote a large part of his time to ballooning. In 1992 Piccard and Wim Verstraeten crossed the Atlantic Ocean, winning the Chrysler Transatlantic Challenge. The pair made two unsuccessful attempts to circle the globe: the first, in 1997, ended with a fuel leak that released toxic fumes into their cabin; and the second try, a 1998 flight in the Breitling Orbiter 2, ended in a rice paddy in Myanmar (Burma).

In the months leading up to Piccard and Jones’s triumphant flight, several prominent individuals, including British billionaire Richard Branson and American adventurer Steve Fossett, failed in their attempts to circumnavigate the globe via balloon. Piccard and Jones were forced to bypass a number of no-fly zones. However, they were granted permission to fly over southern China and thus were able to ride a crucial jet stream air flow over the Pacific Ocean. Their historic flight concluded with a safe landing near the Pyramids of Giza, in Egypt, on March 21. The Breitling Orbiter 3 gondola subsequently was placed on display at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. Piccard was awarded the Legion of Honour by the French government in 2001. After completing the round-the-world trip with Jones, Piccard used his fame to further a number of philanthropic endeavours.

In 2003, with Swiss engineer and pilot André Borschberg, Piccard launched Solar Impulse, a project that had the ultimate goal of developing and launching a solar-powered airplane capable of circumnavigating the globe. The first of those planes, Solar Impulse, was completed in 2009, and a major step occurred when the plane, piloted by Borschberg, completed a 26-hour flight over Switzerland on July 7–8, 2010, becoming the first solar-powered aircraft to fly through the night. Other pioneering milestones included an international flight from Payern, Switzerland, to Brussels, Belgium, in May 2011 and, in June, from Brussels to Paris; and a 19-hour transcontinental flight from Madrid, Spain, to Rabat, Morocco, in 2012.

Construction began in 2011 on the larger Solar Impulse 2, intended to be used for the round-the-world flight attempt. The plane was finished in 2014. Borschberg took off from Abu Dhabi on March 9, 2015, to begin the circumnavigation. Piccard and Borschberg flew different legs on the flight. Borschberg landed in Kalaeloa, Hawaii, on July 3. The batteries had overheated on the flight from Japan to Hawaii, so the circumnavigation was scrubbed until 2016. Solar Impulse 2 took off again on March 9, 2016, from Abu Dhabi. It was in the air for 118 hours on the flight from Nagoya, Japan, to Kalaeloa, the longest solo flight ever. It completed its voyage around the world on July 26, when the plane touched down again in Abu Dhabi with Piccard at the controls.