“I will arrive a little bit too early over Lehigh Valley and I will start now holding”.
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The globe-circling voyage began in March 2015 from Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, and made stops in Oman, Myanmar, China and Japan.
“After the fans that keep the mobile hangar inflated experienced a brief power failure, the plane underwent checks to verify that no damages resulted from the event”, the organizer said in a statement.
However, the plane’s performance on Wednesday was “like it should be” Borschberg said. “It’s a fantastic airplane”.
The two pilots alternate legs of the journey.
“It is safe, but it is hard to make it happen”, Piccard said in an interview Tuesday. “We’ve crossed the U.S.!”
Covered with more than 17,000 solar cells, Solar Impulse is powered by solar energy without any liquid fuel or emissions.
It hasn’t all been smooth sailing, however. The plane taps into batteries to fly for hours in darkness. The trip severely damaged the plane’s battery system, forcing the crew to lay over in Hawaii for nine months, before resuming the journey with a three-day trip from Hawaii to California’s Silicon Valley.
The plane was flown on that stage by Borschberg, whose 118-hour journey smashed the previous record of 76 hours and 45 minutes set by U.S. adventurer Steve Fossett in 2006. The flight was expected to take about 18 hours.
One the pilots flying a solar-power airplane around the world was concerned the crew was “a few seconds” of losing the plane Monday when an inflatable hangar partially collapsed on the fragile craft in Dayton.
At night, it runs on stored energy.
The panels provide the plane’s sole source of energy for the flight.
After crossing the United States, the pilots are set to make a transatlantic flight from NY to Europe, from where they plan to make their way back to their point of departure in Abu Dhabi.
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Just west of Pittsburgh, Piccard took advantage of good weather to fly in circles above the materials science technology company Covestro, just to “say hi” from above to employees of one of the project’s corporate sponsors.
