The circumnavigation effort began in March 2015 in Abu Dhabi.
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Image Credit: Solar Impulse.
The sun-powered Solar Impulse 2 completed the ambitious round-the-world flight after the single-seat aircraft landed in Abu Dhabi Monday evening.
The Solar Impulse project is a story about optimism and how imagination can help solve some our greatest challenges. In a tweet a few hours after the plane took off, Piccard said he wanted Solar Impulse 2’s flight to be a “powerful demonstration” of the potential of clean technology.
The aircraft took off on its final leg from Cairo on Sunday and during the flight, UN Secretary General Ban-Ki moon told Piccard in a live-streamed conversation: “My deepest admiration and respect for your courage”, and added: “This is a historic day not only for you but for humanity”.
The Solar Impulse 2’s voyage began previous year, when the plane took off from Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.
Solar Impluse 2 is powered by 17,248 solar cells that transfer energy to four electrical motors to drive the plane’s propeller. There are oxygen, food and water reserves on board.
Bertrand Piccard, chairman of Solar Impulse and pilot said at the time of the first leg of the journey: “We want to demonstrate that clean technology and renewable energy can achieve the impossible”.
The flight capped a remarkable 42,000km journey across four continents, two oceans and three seas. It made stops in Oman, India, Myanmar, China, Japan, the U.S., Spain, Italy, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates.
The team was delayed in Asia, too. In July 2015, the plane’s batteries overheated during a five-day, five-night flight from Nagoya, Japan, to Hawaii, which grounded the plane until April.
After the batteries were replaced, the pilots had to wait for the next flying season to come around this year before it was safe to attempt the Atlantic crossing.
“If this works, of course, everybody can do it on the ground to make a cleaner world”, one of the pilots said in a Solar Impulse video.
The aircraft itself was first conceived by a pair of Swiss adventurers, Bertrand Piccard and Andre Borschberg, who also piloted the aircraft. The cockpit was tiny and cramped – but worst of all, it wasn’t heated.
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He trained as a Swiss army pilot, learning to fly a range of jets and other aircraft, and in his spare time racked up other professional fixed wing and helicopter licences and practised aerobatics. In 1999, he became the first person to circumnavigate the globe non-stop in a hot air balloon.
