Phoenix is something of a revisit for Solar Impulse 2, having made a stop there during its Across-America marathon in 2013.
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“I made it to Phoenix, what an fantastic flight over the Mojave desert”, Borschberg said in a Twitter post.
The aircraft took off from Mountain View in northern California shortly after 5 a.m. Monday on the 16-hour flight to Phoenix.
After a 16-hour flight, the pilot Andre Borschberg got off the plane and told the crowd it’s much more hard to handle the plane on the ground than in the air, especially when it’s windy. Piccard had flown the plane from Hawaii nine days ago.
The 63-year-old adventurer took off at 5am (12:00am GMT) to take advantage of a clear weather window on a 750 mile (1,203 kilometer) voyage higher over the Mojave Desert. “It feels good to be flying round-the-world with #Si2 again”, Borschberg posted on Twitter after taking off.
It began the 10th leg of the trek – that’s now over a year old – just after 5 a.m.
“As the sun gets higher, #Si2’s energy reserves will start filling up, thanks to all its #cleantechs”, Borschberg wrote on Twitter.
The Solar Impulse II will make two more stops in the U.S. Before heading across the Atlantic.
Thanks to an inflatable mobile hangar, which can be packed up quickly and transported, Solar Impulse 2 can be sheltered at a variety of possible locations.
After Phoenix, Solar Impulse 2 is expected to make at least a couple of additional hops heading for NY. Then he prepared for media interviews and made breakfast plans.
The plane’s four engines are powered by 17,000 solar cells with surplus power stored in four batteries during the day.
The team resumed the mission on April 21, when co-pilot and co-founder Bertrand Piccard took off for California after repairs and test flights were completed.
The carbon-fiber plane, has a wingspan exceeding that of a 747 jetliner and the weight of a family auto.
The crew took several months to fix damage from tropical high temperatures during the first Pacific stage, a 4,000-mile flight between Japan and Hawaii. The journey has encountered countless obstacles along the way, forcing the pilots to make unplanned stops, including one Japan after being caught in risky weather, and 9-month long delay in the island of Oahu in Hawaii, due to battery damage that the plane sustained on its journey from Japan. Borschberg points out that the plane can take off with nearly no battery charge and keep going.
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They said the flight would have taken a conventional airplane just two hours, but the solar craft’s cruising speed, akin to that of a vehicle, required pilots to take up meditation and hypnosis in training to stay alert for long periods.
