Light Makes Flight

摘要

On July 5, 2012, the buzz of Andre Borschberg's cell phone pulled him out of a meeting at a military airfield northeast of Lausanne, Switzerland. The news wasn't good. The former Swiss Air Force pilot rushed to his helicopter and raced the familiar 45-minute route to Dübendorf, near Zurich. After touching down at the helipad, he sprinted to the cavernous hangar and swung open its blue door to find the splintered remains of a critical piece of his latest engineering endeavor: part of the 236-foot-long carbon fiber wing of a solar plane designed to circumnavigate the globe. A team of 40 engineers had spent nine months designing this wing, another nine months building it, and the past four weeks testing it. In a final round of tests, the team had hung an elaborate wooden framework and up to 6 ton; of lead weights off the spine of the wing - known as the wing spar - to simulate the stress of the forces the plane could experience during heavy turbulence. Because of a mistake in the design, the spar had buckled.