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Solar-Powered Plane Faces the Human Factor

The solution, they say, is more technology.

Solar Impulse stands out among airplanes partly because its range is limited not by fuel but the stamina of the pilot.

The single-seat airplane’s cabin is unpressurized, so the pilot must wear an oxygen mask. It has no bathroom. With a grand total of 40 horsepower, the average cruising speed is 38 knots, or about 44 miles an hour, so progress is slow. Even if a pilot can tolerate 26 hours in the tiny cockpit — the record so far — an oceanic flight is hard to imagine.

“The seat is like a really bad economy seat on an airliner,” said Gregory Blatt, a managing director of the company, which is based in Lausanne, Switzerland. “The next version will be like a good business-class seat.”

That version, which is supposed to be able to fly five or six days at a time, will have a bigger seat, a cabin large enough to move around in, some plumbing and various other upgrades, like an autopilot. But that means a heavier plane that will require more efficient solar cells, electric motors and other improvements.

A Solar Impulse plane, an eye-catching proof-of-concept vehicle, arrived at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum’s branch at Dulles Airport over the weekend from St. Louis, part of a photovoltaic barnstorming tour. The plane’s designers say the successor airplane, already under development, needs crucial but incremental improvements.

The four motors on the existing model, for example, are 90 percent efficient in turning current into torque, far better than most motors on the ground. But the new ones are 94 percent efficient, said Bertrand Piccard, chairman of the company and one of the two pilots. (Some inefficiency is desirable, because the energy that does not go into turning the propellers instead becomes heat, which is needed to keep the motors and the batteries warm at cruising altitude, around 29,000 feet. The batteries are tucked into the pods under the wings that hold the motors.)

The solar cells on the wings and the horizontal tail, from the SunPower Corporation of San Jose, Calif., are about 22.7 percent efficient, Mr. Blatt said. New cells will be better than that, he added. The existing plane carries 11,628 solar cells.

The existing cells are of a type already in use, but they are used in Solar Impulse in a new way. They do not cover the skin of the wing, but rather are the skin of the wing: thin monocrystalline cells, given a slight bend so the wing creates lift. The wingspan is huge, about the same as a Boeing 747. The whole plane weighs only about 3,500 pounds, so what aeronautical engineers call “wing loading,” or force of the air on the wing, is low.

The lithium-polymer batteries, from Kokam, a Korean company, are also a commercial product.

Ernest Moniz, the Energy secretary, who visited the hangar on Monday to look at the plane, praised it not only for using new technology but for integrating it into a useful package.

“Energy efficiency and system integration are enormously important areas,” he said. Efficiency is crucial because the propulsion system is not quite as big as one on a large motorcycle.

One innovation is the foam used in the structure of the plane, which has unusually small pores. Dan Reicher, a former assistant secretary of energy now at Stanford Law School, said that the foam had already found its way into refrigerators, because it is a better insulator.

The plane is scheduled to end its tour at Kennedy International Airport in New York early next month, depending on weather. Because it is so light and has such a large wingspan, it is vulnerable to gusts at low altitude, said André Borschberg, the company chief executive and the other pilot.

As a result, it takes off and lands at night, when there is no solar warming of the earth, which produces wind. And landing is an elaborate problem. Its main landing gear is a single wheel, and to keep its wing tips from scraping on the ground, the team deploys two people on electric bicycles to sweep in and hold the wings up as the plane touches down.

With a touchdown speed of 26 knots, about 30 m.p.h., this is not difficult. But it requires a runway without much other traffic, or it becomes like riding a bicycle on an interstate highway. At Kennedy, the plan is to circle at low altitude near the runway until there is a big gap in the traffic, Mr. Piccard said.

Special Report: The Female Factor: Computer Coding: It's Not Just for Boys

But when she told her best friend — “he’s male, also into programming” — his response was not what she had expected. “He was like, ‘Wait, how do you know about them? You’re a girl and you shouldn’t be doing that,”’ Ms. Aleksander said incredulously.

She and her friend Honey Ross, 15, are among the few girls at King Alfred School, their private school in North London, with an intense interest in technology. The two, confident and outgoing, say they understand why: computing can seem boring from the outside, populated mainly by nerdy boys.

“It’s sad,” Ms. Ross said, chatting between classes in the computer lab. “It’s such an amazing world. It’s kind of waiting for loads of young girls” to jump in.

Belinda Parmar would love to see that happen, particularly since current statistics suggest that women in technology, already a relative rarity, are about to get even scarcer.

Three years ago, Ms. Parmar founded Lady Geek, a consulting firm that helps technology companies connect with female customers and bolster the number of women in work forces. Convinced that the paucity of women in technology has its roots in earlier life, Ms. Parmar last fall started Little Miss Geek, a non-profit aimed at convincing girls that programming is not a solitary grind but creative and eventually lucrative work.

Both sexes love gadgets — but while girls may enjoy owning the latest devices, parents and teachers do not point out that they also have the brains to build them, Ms. Parmar says.

“They’re dreaming of using the iPad mini and the latest smartphone, but they’re not dreaming of creating it,” she said.

As a consequence, Ms. Parmar said, women are missing out in an industry that is changing the world and growing and paying handsomely, as other sectors shrink.

Britain’s technology sector is 20 percent female, according to Eurostat, the E.U. statistics agency; Ms. Parmar cites a figure of 17 percent. Neither is far off the E.U. average of 21.8 percent, or the U.S. rate of 24 percent of technology jobs held by women, down from 36 percent in 1991, according to the National Center for Women & Information Technology, at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

The future looks bleak. Girls take just 8 percent of Britain’s computer science A-levels, the high school exam that is the passport to university studies, Little Miss Geek reports. In the United States, girls are 19 percent of high school Advanced Placement test-takers in the field, the Colorado center says.

Ms. Parmar traces the problem at least partly to technology’s image. When her team asked children to draw a person who worked in technology, all sketched men, often geeky and disheveled.

That brainy-guys-in-the-garage stereotype is hardly helped by companies that Ms. Parmar believes condescend to female customers with pink devices, and offend them with bikini-clad models at technology shows. “The technology industry is 30 years behind the car industry” in interaction with women, she said.

If they do enroll in computer classes, pre-adolescent and teenage girls often find they are the only girls in the room.

“Even girls that are doing well at math, they opt out. They just want to belong,” said Marina Larios, president of the European Association for Women in Science, Engineering & Technology.

Messages about gender and technology tend to start in earliest childhood, when boys are encouraged to play computer games and think about how things work, while girls get toy makeup and fashion sets, Ms. Parmar said.

Catherine Ashcraft, senior research scientist at the Colorado center, said:

“It appears on the surface that women aren’t choosing” technology, but “there are a lot of factors that are influencing that choice.” She continued: “Girls talk about how even when there’s a computer in the house, they don’t get access to it as much, because the boys are pushing them away.”

Subtle, even unconscious bias can prompt parents, teachers and guidance counselors to give the sexes different study and career advice, she said.

Advertising: Build-A-Bear Adds a Technology Factor

Now that digital gadgets are a much bigger part of children’s play, Build-A-Bear is opening new stores that aim to entertain digitally adept children with more interactive options to keep them coming back.

The company, which has sold nearly 110 million plush animals since it started in 1997, introduced its first revamped store this week, in St. Louis, and plans to open more such concept stores nationwide.

“We wanted it to be more of an experience,” said Maxine Clark, the founder and chief executive of Build-A-Bear, which has 296 stores in the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico, but has had losses in two of the last three years as the tight economy and electronic games have buffeted the toy market.

“Smartphones and tablets have changed the way children play, so we wanted the stores to stay fun and relevant,” she said.

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The bright yellow stores in shopping malls gained popularity as a hands-on space for children to choose a plush bear, bunny or other animal to make their own, dressing it and giving it a personality and name.

The retailer is introducing its new technology-enhanced stores with radio and digital ads, print ads in local newspapers and television commercials. It will broaden its branding efforts to five additional markets where new stores will open starting in October, then nationwide and internationally, where it has stores in Britain and Ireland as well as franchise stores in other countries.

“We had a period of product advertising, but now we are back emphasizing our brand,” said Ms. Clark.

The company, which had a $17 million loss last year on $394 million in revenue, did not disclose the current campaign’s advertising budget. Build-A-Bear Workshop spent nearly $7.8 million on advertising last year, and $2.7 million in the first six months of 2012, according to Kantar Media, a WPP unit.

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Its new strategy is the first overhaul of Build-A-Bear stores since they were begun by Ms. Clark, who worked at the former May Department Stores and then as president of Payless ShoeSource, the discount footwear retailer that May acquired then later spun off.

In her 2006 book, “The Bear Necessities of Business,” Ms. Clark describes how a shopping trip with a young friend to buy collectible stuffed animals gave her the idea to start a business where children could create their own huggable characters.

The retailer’s core customer, Ms. Clark said, is an 8-year-old girl. The average customer visits two to three times a year to create a customized animal, or to buy outfits.

But with children engaging in more virtual play, Ms. Clark said she began thinking, “How can we unlock a new experience each time a customer comes?”

Two years ago, the retailer began testing ideas, working with the Adrienne Weiss Corporation, a Chicago advertising agency that was part of the original brand development, to reinvent the store design.

“When the stores first opened, play patterns were fairly traditional,” said Dave Finnegan, Build-A-Bear’s chief information officer. “So we reached out to kids and parents to articulate some ideas,” and enlisted cub advisers — children from 6 to 12 years old from the St. Louis area — to test the technology, design, layout and experience. Build-A-Bear is based in St. Louis.

“What we came up with,” said Mr. Finnegan, “is half retail and half theme park.”

Working with Microsoft Kinect movement technology, the new stores have a large screen at the front so customers can play games by waving their hands in front of it. Customers can visit eight new technology stations intended to increase hands-on engagement.

Starting next month, 15- and 30-second commercials will be shown nationwide that promote the new choices. A separate 30-second commercial has been tailored for markets in California, Indiana, Maryland, Michigan and Virginia, where new stores are opening.

A one-minute video is being posted Thursday on buildabear.com offering a virtual tour of new features like the new “love me” touch screen where a child can choose a heart for his or her stuffed animal. Other new options include a customized sound chip and scents like chocolate chip or cotton candy that can be embedded in the stuffed animal.

The animal can also be dressed in numerous outfits tailored to boys and girls. In addition to a name, the animal gets a birth certificate and a bar code that allows a lost animal to be tracked and returned. That happens about 500 times a year, the company said.

The new stores will offer a separate section for boys, who make up about 30 percent of customers.

Build-A-Bear is keeping the same pricing, between $10 and $30 for a stuffed animal, and will include some new features in existing stores. At first glance, the revamped stores — which are painted in bold primary colors — look very similar to the existing ones, Ms. Clark said. “Kids see our stores and run up to them,” she said. “We didn’t want to change that.”