Presented to the world as the future of clean aviation, the Solar Impulse airplane was sold last year to a little-known start-up which plans to use the technology to develop surveillance drones for the military sector. An investigation by the Swiss public broadcaster, RTS.
This content was published on November 23, 2020 - 09:22 November 23, 2020 - 09:22
Marc Renfer & Yann Dieuaide/RTS See in another language: 1 - Français
(fr) L'avion Solar Impulse se transforme en projet à portée militaire
Unlike the rest of the Solar Impulse adventure, the operation was concluded with little fanfare. On September 11, 2019, a simple press release announced the sale of the solar-powered airplane in which Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg completed their unprecedented flight around the world in 2016 .
'Solar Impulse, in this contemplated second life, will continue to illustrate that clean technologies can achieve the impossible while at the same time building a sustainable future. With Skydweller, the Solar Impulse, the world's most famous solar-powered aircraft of unlimited endurance will have concrete benefits for the greater good,' Piccard enthused in the statement.
However, according to RTS investigations, Skydweller Aero, the young Spanish-American company with a bare-bones website , has military intentions for the future of the Solar Impulse 2. The plane will serve as the basis for the development of autonomous drones, capable of continuous flight, for surveillance and telecommunications purposes.
Skydweller's main shareholder, Italian defence group Leonardo (formerly Finmeccanica), raised the concept of an autonomous machine based on the Solar Impulse during the last Dubai Airshow: a project capable 'of carrying radar, electronic optics, telecommunications devices, telephone listening and interception systems'.
Multi-million-dollar marketLeonardo, which owns almost 20% of Skydweller, believes in these future developments.
'The size of the market is enormous,' comments Laurent Sissmann, one of the project managers. 'For military applications alone, we are talking about hundreds of millions which could be captured by Skydweller'. For civil applications, Sissmann describes potential applications such as 'a telecommunications relay system, observation of natural catastrophes and mapping'.
Today, the plane that flew around the world is being reassembled out of sight at Spain's Albacete Airport. Skydweller, whose parent company is based in Delaware — an American state with a lenient tax regime — has announced the plane will soon be ready to retake to the skies. The group declined requests for an interview.
Solar Impulse's old test pilot has been poached and is responsible for getting the machine back into flight, however Skydweller's long term objective is to replace humans with an autonomous system and to take advantage of the reduced weight to install surveillance and observation tools.
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