Piccard said that Solar Impulse has shown what can be done with clean technology in aviation – and beyond. He urges the industry to take it forward, commercialise it and scale it up.

In 2016, Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg, the founders of Solar Impulse, completed the first circumnavigation of the globe with no fuel. With their solar aircraft, they flew 40,000 km to promote the use of clean technologies. Piccard gave an opening keynote at EBACE in Geneva recently, urging the aviation industry to take things forward from here.

Ecology meets economy

“We can now reconcile ecology and economy,” he said. Read the full round-up of his keynote here.

The FINN team caught up with Piccard to get his input on how this will work in practice. He envisions “1,000 profitable solutions to protect the environment” by 2018 and explains the work the Solar Impulse Foundation is doing to support this.

“Clean growth is better than a dirty status quo.”

By Bertrand Piccard, Solar Impulse