The Swiss-made Solar Impulse 2 lands in suburban Phoenix, May 2, 2016. The region between Phoenix and Tulsa is known as “tornado alley” and high winds and thunderstorms are common during the spring and summer, so weather was an important factor in the timing.
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There’s a good chance the Solar Impulse airplane that’s trying to fly around the world using only energy from the sun might fly directly over Springfield and southwest Missouri.
The flight scheduled to venture around the world is set to stop in Tulsa this week.
A solar-powered airplane has landed in Oklahoma after taking off from Arizona on the latest leg of its around-the-world journey.
With this last stage, the solar-powered plane continues its North American route after the first stage between San Francisco and Phoenix which the other inventor of the aircraft Andre Borschberg completed on May 2.
The trip began in March 2015 from Abu Dhabi, with stops in Oman, Myanmar, China and Japan, before flying over the Pacific Ocean and reaching Hawaii in July 2015.
“We have been extremely lucky with the weather and with great collaboration between the mission engineers in Monaco and the Air Traffic Control in the United States, we have been able to fly consistently since mid-April”, the team wrote on its website.
“The aim is to rally NY as soon as possible”, said the Solar Impulse 2 team in a statement on Wednesday.
The crew took several months to fix the damage from high tropical temperatures during a 4,000-mile (6,437-kilometer) flight between Nagoya, Japan and Hawaii. The wings are so large to carry the solar panels that power the plane.
After Solar Impulse 2’s flights across the US, the plane will undertake two final flights over the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea before landing back in Abu Dhabi to complete the around-the-world circuit.
The typical flight speed is around 30 miles (48 kilometers) an hour, which can increase to double that when exposed to full sunlight.
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The plane had a five-day trip from Japan to Hawaii and three-day trip from Hawaii to California’s Silicon Valley.
