Bertrand Piccard built one of the most extraordinary careers in modern exploration: psychiatrist, hypnotherapist, hang-gliding champion, balloonist, record-setting pilot and clean-aviation pioneer.
His work is still moving forward in 2026. In July, the European Commission granted official patronage to Climate Impulse, Piccard’s next aviation project. The aircraft is being developed to attempt a future nonstop, zero-emission flight around the world using liquid green hydrogen. Climate Impulse’s official project site says the round-the-world flight is planned for 2030.
Long before that project, Piccard trained in medicine. He graduated from the University of Lausanne in 1986 and became a psychiatrist specializing in hypnotherapy. At the same time, aviation was already becoming a second career. He competed in hang gliding, became European aerobatics champion in 1985 and later moved into ballooning.
In 1992, Piccard and Wim Verstraeten won the first transatlantic balloon race. Seven years later, Piccard and Brian Jones completed the first nonstop flight around the world in a balloon. Their Breitling Orbiter 3 journey lasted 19 days, 21 hours and 55 minutes and covered roughly 45,755 kilometers. Solar Impulse’s record of the flight describes it as the longest aviation flight of its era in both distance and duration.
Piccard then shifted from ballooning toward clean-energy aviation. He launched the Solar Impulse project with engineer and pilot André Borschberg, developing an aircraft designed to fly using solar power without fuel. Between 2015 and 2016, the team completed the first round-the-world solar flight, covering about 40,000 kilometers with the pilots alternating legs.
Today, Piccard also leads the Solar Impulse Foundation, which evaluates technologies intended to combine environmental benefits with economic viability. His résumé belongs beside Victor Vescovo’s path from Everest to Challenger Deep to space, Kathryn Sullivan’s career from spacewalk to Challenger Deep, and Brian May’s career spanning music and astrophysics. Piccard’s version links medicine, human psychology, record-setting exploration and experimental aviation across four decades.
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