NOVA

A mission like no other.

A plane powered only by the sun.

Set to fly around the world without a drop of fuel.

What we do in the air, we can do on the ground.

And this is our message.

This journey will push the limits of technology.

It's made of fabric, it's made of carbon,

and you can break it with your finger.

It will test the endurance of its pilots.

Do something wrong, just one thing, they could die,

and you carry that for your, for the rest of your life.

Flying solo day and night.

We never flew over the ocean.

Five nights in a row, that's the main challenge.

Switching on the solar generators.

They will risk their lives.

There's bad weather coming in

and then thunderstorms,

and afterwards it's turning northwest.

Either we divert, or we take a big risk.

To realize a dream for our planet.

The decision we take

goes far beyond the flight itself.

"The Impossible Flight," right now on "NOVA."

To fly, fueled only by the power of the sun.

It's an audacious idea

that gave rise to an airplane unlike any other ever built,

now embarking on a revolutionary and risky mission.

The risk is really high.

I don't want to gamble with a pilot in the ocean.

A lot of people can be a little bit afraid, scared,

by the unknown in which we are jumping.

A perilous journey, 26,000 miles around the world,

without a drop of fuel.

I think it's very dangerous.

You know, we never have the story of those who got killed.

We have to do it to demonstrate it works.

So someone has to do it first.

Someone has to try.

The zero-fuel flight begins in Abu Dhabi

in the United Arab Emirates,

where the sun's energy is in abundance

nearly every day of the year.

To have an airplane that could fly forever without fuel.

No noise, no pollution.

That was the dream from the beginning.

We can move up a little bit.

Just a little bit, just a little bit... a little.

It was a dream that aviation experts quickly dismissed.

A solar plane capable of carrying a person

around the world

would have to be too big, too light,

and likely impossible to control.

There are moments where you have to take some risks

if you want to achieve something that has never been done.

Otherwise, we stay in the armchair,

and we wait until we're old and we do nothing.

We're in the early hours of the morning here.

The Solar Impulse 2 is ready to embark

on its ambitious round-the-world journey.

After weeks of flight tests over Abu Dhabi,

the airplane, known as Solar Impulse,

prepares for takeoff.

Over 3,000 miles away,

flight operations are run from a command center in Monaco.

Okay, André, everything is ready.

We still wait for the final go from the SRB.

The project is the brainchild of Bertrand Piccard,

psychiatrist, adventurer,

and heir to a family legacy of scientific exploration.

In 1969, I was 11,

and I saw Apollo 11 taking off to the moon.

And I said, "I want to have that type of life."

16 years I've been dreaming of that,

the art of flight around the world with no fuel.

There are doubts all the time, but...

When you're doing something that nobody has done before,

the doubts are important.

If you are on a straight line with your beliefs,

you never succeed in something new.

Solar Impulse from Solar Ground, confirm you get the clearance.

Okay, solar generator looks good.

Continue with engines, then.

Have a good flight, André.

Let's start the adventure.

Okay, finally.

It's the magic, magic moment.

Main wheel liftoff.

Thank you very much.

Currently altitude 5,300 feet.

To help make his dream a reality,

Bertrand turned to André Borschberg...

A man known for pushing boundaries,

both as a fighter pilot in the Swiss Air Force

and an engineer with a graduate degree from M.I.T.

The airplane was considered to be possible

to be built and flown.

The challenge is how?

I mean, to make something like this, huh?

Here is an airplane we designed, we dreamt about.

It's a big part of, part of me.

It's really a phenomenal sight, but crazy to believe

that it is just the sun powering that plane here...

Their dream is to show a way forward without fossil fuels

and spread a message about the need to fight climate change.

They are planning on about 12 flight legs.

With only one seat in the plane,

the pilots will have to take turns in the cockpit.

The most difficult will be the flights

over the world's two largest oceans,

lasting anywhere from three to five days.

At an average speed of just 45 miles an hour,

the 26,000-mile trip will be long and full of uncertainty.

Five months now, the plane, starting this way,

if everything goes well, comes back this way in July.

It is so much more difficult

to use these clean technologies in the air

than to use them on the ground.

So if it works in the air,

I really hope people will understand

that they can replace all these old, polluting old stuff

by new, clean technologies.

What we do in the air we can do on the ground,

and this is our message.

When you fly with the sun as the only source of energy,

that's a completely different world, a different feeling.

The revolutionary plane

is powered by over 17,000 solar cells

that collect and transform the sun's rays into electricity.

That energy is distributed to four 17-horsepower engines,

each with the daily power output of a small motor scooter.

Any spare energy is stored in four lithium-polymer batteries,

which enable the plane to fly at night or under cloud cover.

The dilemma was how to build something

big enough to collect maximum sunlight,

but light enough to run on as little energy as possible.

The trade-off was instability in anything but perfect weather.

The plane is fragile and vulnerable to the elements.

Hello, André.

Below you, you have a small thermal inversion,

and below this thermal inversion,

you have all this dust and haze.

At mission control in Monaco,

a team of meteorologists, engineers,

and mission planners...

Many of them also highly trained pilots...

Monitors an array

of instrumentation and weather models

during flight.

You can put some more power...

Lead meteorologist Luc Trullemans

has guided long-range aviation and ballooning expeditions

across the globe.

But this mission presents a unique challenge.

This aircraft is so light, so fragile,

trying to find the places where he can fly

is not so easy.

When you have a downdraft or updrafts,

this aircraft can break in two.

Rain, humidity, and turbulence, forget it.

Only sun and quiet weather and tailwinds.

On this flight, they must steer clear of dust storms

and turbulence caused by heat rising off the desert.

Each flight leg will have its own difficulties,

like avoiding thunderstorms and crosswinds,

which could blow the plane off course.

We are excited, but there's a lot of fear, as well.

I think the overall round-the-world flight

you can compare to an Apollo mission.

If you do something wrong, just one thing, they could die,

and you carry that for your, for the rest of your life.

Two meters.

One meter.

The most dangerous part of every flight is the landing,

where the fragile wings are that much closer to the ground.

This pit stop in Muscat, Oman,

is just long enough to clean the dust off the solar wings

before the next leg to Ahmedabad, India.

The team back in Monaco plans on using high-altitude winds

to push the plane away from incoming clouds.

These thin and wispy cirrus clouds

could block a critical amount of sunlight.

For this 15-hour flight across the Arabian Sea,

Bertrand will take the controls.

Microphone and headphone,

and the cuffs... when it starts to vibrate on your arm,

and this is to alert the pilot if the bank is too, too high.

With no heat in the cockpit,

the pilots must wear heated boots

and a sub-zero-rated parka.

Inside the cockpit, temperatures will range

from minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit

to 95 degrees when they descend during the summer heat.

Solar Impulse's ground crew readies the plane

to take off before sunrise to avoid turbulence

and stay one step ahead of the clouds.

When I was a child, I was afraid to climb in the tree.

Fear is there.

Either you have no fear at all,

which means you're completely crazy,