The first aircraft powered exclusively by the sun made its landing into history, reaching Abu Dhabi on Tuesday and completing a 25,000 mile, round-the-world journey that began over a year ago.
Advertisement
“We have enough solutions, enough technologies”.
After landing the plane, pilot Bertrand Piccard was greeted outside the cockpit by his Solar Impulse partner and fellow pilot Andre Borschberg. “The future is clean, the future is you, the future is now”. The plane’s wingspan stretches 236 feet (72 meters) to catch the sun’s energy.
The next two stages see Solar Impulse fly to Varanasi (Benares), India, and Mandalay, in Myanmar. “Let’s take it further”. It was the endurance capabilities of the two pilots that dictated the journey’s route and regular stops, rather than Solar Impulse 2 itself, which could theoretically fly forever on the power provided by 17,000 photovoltaic cells housed on its wings. It runs on four lithium polymer batteries at night.
The plane was piloted by Bertrand Piccard during the last stage between Egypt and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
The plane resumes its journey across the United States on May 2, stopping in Phoenix (Arizona), Tulsa (Oklahoma), Dayton (Ohio), Lehigh Valley (Pennsylvania) and JFK International Airport in NY after circling the Statue of Liberty in the middle of the night.
The flight works on the principle that during daylight, the solar panels charge the plane’s batteries, which make up a quarter of the craft’s 2.3 tonne weight.
The project was also beset by bad weather and illness, which forced Piccard to delay the final leg.
Borschberg, 63, smashed the record for the longest uninterrupted solo journey in aviation history between Nagoya, Japan and Hawaii that lasted almost 118 hours and covered 8,924 kilometres past year.
“The biggest challenge is to have an airplane that can fly perpetually, days and nights without refuelling, because there is no fuel”.
“I think you will spend the next hours thinking about the flight, all the human moments and all the energy we have”, his co-pilot Borschberg said.
Advertisement
As co-founders of Solar Impulse, Piccard and Borschberg say their feat was created to prove “that clean technologies can achieve the impossible”, telling the Guardian that their 40,000 kilometer journey was “not just a first in the history of aviation, but also a first in the history of energy”.
