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.
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Swiss pilot Andre Borschberg flew the plane, which began its globe-circling journey a year ago.
GOODYEAR, Ariz. (AP) – An airplane powered only by sunlight has arrived in a Phoenix suburb after completing the latest leg of its global trip.
A solar-powered plane has landed in suburban Phoenix after a flight from California on the latest leg of its round-the-world journey.
It has bigger wings than a 747 to hold the thousands of cells that catch the sun’s rays and power the Solar Impulse II. The plane is therefore capable of saving a maximum amount of energy during the day and flying throughout the night on batteries.
Ideal flight speed is about 28 miles per hour, though that can double during the day when the sun’s rays are strongest.
The company also helped designed the plane’s predecessor, Solar Impulse 1.
And he added: “It was a special flight; not a long flight”.
“Sometimes it is more hard to handle the airplane on the ground than in flight”, he told reporters.
“I made it to Phoenix, what an incredible flight over the Mojave desert”, Borschberg said in a Twitter post.
The layovers will give the pilots a chance to swap places and engage with local communities along the way so they can explain the project, which is estimated to be costing more than 100 million dollars (£68 million) and began in 2002 to highlight the importance of renewable energy and the spirit of innovation.
Swiss pilot André Borschberg was at the helm of the plane that began a circumnavigation of the globe a year ago. It stopped in Oman, Myanmar, China and Japan en route to the United States.
The crew took several months to fix damage from tropical high temperatures during the first Pacific stage, a 4,000-mile flight between Japan and Hawaii.
Piccard completed the trans-Pacific crossing last month, reaching San Francisco after a flight of almost three days, more than three times the 18 hours Amelia Earhart took to fly solo from Hawaii to California in the 1930s.
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The next touchdown after the United States will be somewhere in Europe, and the location will be decided based on weather forecasts. It also set new duration and distance records for solar-powered flight.
