GENEVA: At 62 years of age, Swiss Solar Impulse 2 pilot Andre Borschberg has made aviation history with a record breaking solo flight across the Pacific that he has called “an interior journey”.

After travelling more than 8,000 kilometres on the latest leg of the round-the-world trip, he arrived in Hawaii on Friday.

His Pacific flight from Japan totalled 118 hours, almost five full days, smashing the previous record for the longest nonstop solo flight of 76 hours and 45 minutes set by Us adventurer Steve Fossett in 2006.

The Swiss pilot’s arduous journey was by no means in the lap of luxury. His plane runs on solar power alone, so its weight had to be kept to a minimum.

Borschberg flew alone in a cockpit where he could only sit or lie down, and slept for intervals of 20 minutes with a vibrating armband waking him up in case of an anomaly.

Before taking off , the pilot said that this journey would be an “extraordinary occasion to discover myself”. When he landed he tweeted “it’s a dream coming true”.

Borschberg partnered with Swiss psychiatrist and balloonist Bertrand Piccard to launch the unprecedented flight around the world on a plane powered exclusively by solar energy.

Solar Impulse 2 set off from Abu Dhabi earlier this year in a multi-leg attempt to fly around the world without using any fuel.

The plane will now be flown across the United States and eventually, if all goes according to plan, land back in AbuDhabi next March. It has 17,000 solar cells and onboard rechargeable lithium batteries, allowing it to fly through the night.

Its wingspan is longer than that of a jumbo jet but it weighs only 2.3 tons — about the same as a car.

The pilot, born in Zurich, is no stranger to adventure. Fifteen years ago, he narrowly escaped an avalanche, and then in 2013 he was involved in a helicopter crash, which left him with minor injuries.

With an imposing stature and an athletic build, Borschberg attributes his mental strength to yoga and meditation, which he practises in his garden at his home on the shores of the idyllic Lake Geneva.

He earned his degree in mechanics and thermodynamics from the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland, following up with master’s degrees from MIT in the US and HEC Lausanne.

Published in Dawn July 4th, 2015

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