The goal of the adventure, headed by co-pilots Bertrand Piccard, a Swiss psychiatrist, and André Borschberg, a Swiss engineer and entrepreneur, is to draw attention to the promise of clean technologies.
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Piccard, who has been alternating the long solo flights with teammate Andre Borschberg, will now hand over to his teammate who will pilot the Solar Impulse across the United States and to NY.
During the interview Saturday night, Piccard recalled being inspired as a child living in the US, close to Cape Canaveral, Florida, where he witnessed some of NASA’s launches to the moon and met “most of the astronauts”, who inspired him to dream. But destination really depends on the weather.
For Piccard, landing in risk-taking Silicon Valley was an inspired stop.
He added: “Clean technology can achieve impossible things, like flying day and night with no fuels in a solar airplane”.
Despite the dangers and the difficulties faced by the aircraft and its pilot across the Pacific, the Solar Impulse 2 triumphantly crossed the waters and entered California on Saturday. “It brings the possibility for people to develop themselves”. In Europe, it’s mostly about protecting the environment.
The other message the pilots hope to hammer home?
Over the weekend, I had the opportunity to have a midair conversation with Bertrand Piccard who, at the time, was on the home stretch of a solo flight across the Pacific in a plane powered entirely by 17,248 solar cells.
That mantra is central to what some have called his nearly Jules Verne-like heritage: Piccard’s grandfather invented the principle of the pressurized cabin, the stratospheric balloon and the first deep-sea submersible. He was aboard a helicopter to welcome Piccard as he approached the Bay Area. In fact, he was raring to get back up into the skies as soon as possible.
Solar Impulse 2 flying past the Golden Gate Bridge.
This experimental journey around the world began in March 2015, from Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, and continued through Oman, Myanmar, China, Japan and Hawaii.
A month later, when weather conditions were right, the plane departed from Nagoya in central Japan for Hawaii. Aside from being costly, it moves pretty slow, with its ideal flight speed at about 28 miles per hour.
With a wingspan larger than a Boeing 747 but the heft of a vehicle, the Solar Impulse 2 is completely powered by the more than 17,000 solar cells that supply power to the four electric motors and charge the aircraft’s batteries.
The solar-powered aircarft. which stores energy in batteries for when the sun is not shining, will stop in NY before a transatlantic flight to Europe.
He said the plane “represents what we could do on the ground in our communities”.
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Still, the pilots and their team of more than 100 pushed onward, repairing the aircraft and preparing it for what they called “the moment of truth” – the Pacific crossing to Hawaii.
