The 4,203-mile journey marked the first-ever solar-powered, electric and fuel-free flight across the Atlantic Ocean. The Aero-Club of Switzerland said the Solar Impulse 2 landed in Seville in southern Spain at 0540 GMT on Thursday, ending a 70-hour flight which began from New York City on Monday.
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The zero-emission plane will be making its next stop somewhere in Greece or Egypt-depending on the weather-before it returns to Abu Dhabi.
For power-saving reasons, the Solar Impulse 2 cockpit can only carry a single human, and is both unheated and unpressurised.
The aircraft, which has the wingspan of a Boeing 747 but only weighs about as much as an SUV, took off from New York’s JFK airport Monday night after mission engineers identified a narrow weather window in which to undertake the almost four-day flight, CNN reported.
Solar Impulse 2 typically cruises at around 40 miles per hour, but the plane made better time for this trip due to calm weather and favorable winds.
Thanks to ultra-lightweight composite materials, Solar Impulse 2 weighs only about as much as a minivan (5,000 pounds) but has a wider wingspan than a Boeing 747 (236 feet vs. 224 feet). The team was on the ground to welcome Swiss pilot and adventurer Bertrand Piccard, an AFP correspondent said.
Solar Impulse 2 which has just completed 15th leg of its east-west trip, set out on March 9, 2015, in Abu Dhabi, and has flown across Asia and the Pacific to the United States with the sun as its only source of power.
“The goal of this committee is to continue the legacy Solar Impulse started, promoting concrete energy efficient solutions in order to solve numerous challenges facing society today”, the Solar Impulse team said in its announcement.
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Prior to its flight from NY to Seville, Solar Impulse 2 made stops in India, Myanmar, China, Japan, Hawaii, California, Phoenix, Tulsa, Dayton, Lehigh Valley. “With this transatlantic flight our aim is to inspire the adoption of clean technologies everywhere”, said Bertrand Piccard, Solar Impulse Initiator and Chairman who flew the zero-fuel aircraft over the Atlantic. The plane runs on stored energy at night. It’s incredibly environment-friendly and just proves that renewable technology is the future of energy consumption.
