Swiss pilot André Borschberg took off in Solar Impulse 2 at 6.20am (CET) from the southern Spanish city of Seville for Egypt.
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Pic: ReutersAn airplane powered exclusively by energy from the sun took off from southern Spain early on Monday on the penultimate leg of the first ever fuel-free round-the-world flight.
The 4,000-kilometre journey should take him across the Mediterranean, via the airspaces of Algeria, Tunisia, Malta, Italy, Greece, and finally land in Egypt.
“An oil-producing country and they created Masdar to diversify their economy and discover renewable energy that is incredible, this is why we choose Abu Dhabi as our host country”, said Bertrand Piccard, Solar Impulse’s second pilot and co-founder.
“It’s my last flight for this round the world epic so I start to think about it”. Of course I’m happy that we get close to the end. The original destination was Paris but bad weather meant Solar Impulse 2 had to set down in Seville.
The flight, Borschberg’s last in the huge aircraft, should take 50 hours and 30 minutes.
The flight to Cairo should be the penultimate leg before the solar-powered plane returns to Abu Dhabi where it began its round-the-world journey in early in 2015.
Borschberg was in the cockpit for the Pacific Ocean crossing, from Nagoya, Japan to Hawaii, which took 118 hours.
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With a cruising speed of around 70 kilometres an hour (43 miles per hour), similar to an average auto, the plane has more than 17,0000 solar cells built in to wings with a span bigger than that of a Boeing 747.
