Unisphere Partners as Mission Planning Partner for Climate Impulse

Back in July 2016, Solar Impulse 2 made avi­a­tion his­to­ry by com­plet­ing the world’s first solar pow­ered cir­cum­nav­i­ga­tion. At the heart of that pio­neer­ing mis­sion were Christoph Schlet­tig and Michael Anger, who served as Flight Direc­tors respon­si­ble for day-to-day mis­sion plan­ning and flight oper­a­tions. Their work proved that when oper­at­ing air­craft at the absolute lim­its of per­for­mance, weath­er, ener­gy man­age­ment, and flight plan­ning are com­plete­ly insep­a­ra­ble.

With the thought of trans­lat­ing these hard-won oper­a­tional insights into scal­able tech­nol­o­gy, the idea for Uni­sphere was born. Today, the soft­ware com­pa­ny builds auto­mat­ed sim­u­la­tion and flight plan­ning tech­nolo­gies for the era of unmanned and green avi­a­tion, embed­ding real world flight direc­tor exper­tise direct­ly into cut­ting edge sim­u­la­tion tech­nolo­gies.

Mark­ing the 10th anniver­sary of the Solar Impulse adven­ture, this lega­cy comes full cir­cle: Uni­sphere has been select­ed as the Mis­sion Plan­ning Part­ner for Cli­mate Impulse — Bertrand Pic­card and Raphaël Dinelli’s ambi­tious project to achieve the first non-stop round-the-world flight pow­ered by green hydro­gen.

“Work­ing on Solar Impulse was a once-in-a-life­time expe­ri­ence,” says Christoph Schlet­tig, CEO of Uni­sphere. “The mis­sion fun­da­men­tal­ly changed the way we think about flight plan­ning. Every oper­a­tional les­son we learned – from ener­gy man­age­ment to weath­er deci­sion-mak­ing – has been incor­po­rat­ed into the soft­ware we build today. It is incred­i­bly reward­ing to see this knowl­edge now sup­port­ing Cli­mate Impulse.”

While Solar Impulse relied on sev­er­al spe­cialised teams work­ing in par­al­lel — con­tin­u­ous­ly analysing weath­er sys­tems, air traf­fic con­straints, air­craft per­for­mance, ener­gy man­age­ment and oth­er oper­a­tional para­me­ters before inte­grat­ing this infor­ma­tion into the mis­sion plan­ning process — today, Uni­sphere’s plat­form auto­mates these high­ly com­plex tasks.

The plat­form com­bines dig­i­tal twins of the air­craft, high-res­o­lu­tion weath­er fore­casts and sophis­ti­cat­ed opti­mi­sa­tion algo­rithms to con­stant­ly assess­es how envi­ron­men­tal con­di­tions influ­ence per­for­mance, ener­gy use, rout­ing and mis­sion safe­ty — allow­ing flight plans to be refined in real time.

“Cli­mate Impulse intro­duces a com­plete­ly new propul­sion tech­nol­o­gy with hydro­gen, bring­ing its own oper­a­tional chal­lenges,” explains Michael Anger, CTO of Uni­sphere. “Our soft­ware con­tin­u­ous­ly eval­u­ates how weath­er affects air­craft per­for­mance and ener­gy con­sump­tion, help­ing deter­mine the safest and most ener­gy-effi­cient flight pro­file through­out the mis­sion.”

Cli­mate Impulse rep­re­sents a bold new chap­ter in sus­tain­able avi­a­tion, push­ing the bound­aries of what zero-emis­sion tech­nol­o­gy can achieve. By har­ness­ing the pow­er of green hydro­gen, the ambi­tious non-stop glob­al jour­ney aims to demon­strate that clean avi­a­tion can suc­cess­ful­ly accom­plish mis­sions once con­sid­ered phys­i­cal­ly impos­si­ble.

“To achieve the impos­si­ble, vision alone is not enough. You also need the right oper­a­tional exper­tise and tech­nol­o­gy. Christoph, Michael and the Uni­sphere team com­bine the unique expe­ri­ence gath­ered 10 years ago from Solar Impulse with a new gen­er­a­tion of dig­i­tal mis­sion plan­ning tools. They will play a cru­cial role in help­ing Cli­mate Impulse fly safe­ly and effi­cient­ly around the world,” said Bertrand Pic­card, Co-founder, Pres­i­dent and pilot of Cli­mate Impulse.

For Uni­sphere, the part­ner­ship also marks a sym­bol­ic mile­stone: ten years after help­ing write avi­a­tion his­to­ry with Solar Impulse, the team is once again sup­port­ing Bertrand Pic­card in push­ing the bound­aries of what is pos­si­ble in flight.

Thomas Sleightholm

Thomas is a con­tent writer for eVTOL Insights, cov­er­ing all aspects of the glob­al Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty ecosys­tem. Got a sto­ry for him? Please send an email to editorial@evtolinsights.com

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