Borschberg and Solar Impulse’s other co-founder, Swiss psychologist-adventurer Bertrand Piccard, have been alternating the piloting duties for the round-the-world trip, which began in Abu Dhabi in March 2015.
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Solar Impulse 2 took off from Mountain View (in northern California) shortly after 5 a.m. Monday for an expected 16-hour flight to Phoenix. The next leg of the solar. The four engines of the propeller-driven aircraft are powered exclusively by energy collected from more than 17,000 solar cells built into its wings. The solar cells send energy to four lithium batteries, which power four motors, which turn four propellers.
In a precursor to their globe-circling quest, the two men completed a multi-flight crossing of the United States with an earlier version of the solar plane in 2013. Borschberg said he did yoga and meditated to keep himself alert.
The solar-powered plane, which stores energy in batteries for when the sun is not shining, will stop in NY before a transatlantic flight to Europe.
The two legs to cross the Pacific were the riskiest part of the plane’s travels because of the lack of emergency landing sites. The Solar Impulse 2 is capable of flying day and night without fuel.
The plane took of at 8:03 a.m. ET (5:03 a.m. PT) for a trip to Phoenix that is expected to last 16 hours and 23 minutes.
“We have demonstrated it is feasible to fly many days, many nights, that the technology works”, said Borschberg at the time. They’ve made stops in Myanmar, Oman, Japan, China, and Hawaii.
The point of the exercise is to show how environmentally clean technologies can be used in a variety of industrial applications, ranging from electric-powered aviation to high-tech insulation materials that were developed for Solar Impulse and are already being used in next-generation refrigerators as well.
The plane’s wingspan is wider than that of a jumbo jet but its weight is roughly the same as a family vehicle. The $150 million effort got as far as Hawaii last July, but the plane’s batteries were damaged by overheating during a five-day Pacific crossing.
But the feat dealt a setback to the Solar Impulse team. The crew took several months to fix the damage from high tropical temperatures during the first Pacific stage, a 4,000-mile flight between Japan and Hawaii.
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The aircraft was flown on that leg by Borschberg, whose 118-hour journey smashed the previous record of 76 hours and 45 minutes set by USA adventurer Steve Fossett in 2006. The pilot, Andre Borschberg, spent a whopping 62 hours straight inside the small cockpit during the journey.
