Solar Impulse round-the-world plane lands in California after 2.5-day flight

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Solar Impulse 2 plane
Solar Impulse 2 flies over San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge. (Credit: Solar Impulse)

Two and a half days after setting out from Hawaii, pilot Bertrand Piccard made a picture-postcard arrival in California tonight aboard the fuel-free Solar Impulse 2 airplane.

“Thank you for your welcome!” he told well-wishers who gathered at Moffett Airfield in Mountain View, Calif.

The landing at 11:45 p.m. PT was marked by a bit of turbulence, but nothing Piccard couldn’t handle. “The touchdown is a little bit stronger than I would have expected,” he acknowledged.

This week’s 2,400-mile nonstop trek was the second-longest leg of what’s expected to be a 22,000-mile round-the-world flight, the first ever done with a solar-powered aircraft.

The Swiss-led, $150 million effort is aimed at calling attention to environmentally friendly technologies, including the 17,000 solar cells and the lithium polymer batteries that sustain the plane and its solo pilot.

“America is the world of pioneers,” Piccard told an interviewer after the landing. “Americans invented aviation. … So now I think innovation and pioneering must continue. It must continue for better quality of life. Clean technology, renewable energy: This is where the pioneers can really express themselves and be successful. So I hope it will be a big success for clean technologies in America.”

Solar Impulse 2 builds on the legacy of the original Solar Impulse, which made a coast-to-coast trip across America in 2013. Its 236-foot wingspan is wider than a Boeing 747’s, but its 5,100-pound weight puts it on a level with a family car.

Because the plane is so light and capable, it can fly through the night using the energy that’s stored up in the batteries during the day. But it can’t fly as fast as a commercial airliner. Its average speed is typically around 40 mph. Thanks to a strong tail wind, Solar Impulse 2 was able to hit a top speed of more than 90 mph during this week’s trip.

The current round-the-world attempt began in March 2015 in Abu Dhabi, with stopovers in Oman, India, Myanmar, China, Japan and Hawaii. Last July’s five-day nonstop flight from Japan to Hawaii overtaxed the plane’s batterles, and the Solar Impulse team required nine months to make repairs and resume the odyssey.

No problems were encountered this time around. “This flight was really smooth from a technical point of view,” flight director Michael Anger said from Mission Control in Monaco.

The flight seemed smooth for Piccard as well. For more than 62 hours, the co-founder and chairman of Solar Impulse ate, slept and catnapped in the cockpit, occasionally relying on the autopilot.

Piccard entered California airspace in the afternoon, but had to wait several hours for air traffic to settle down for the landing at Moffett Airfield, a civil-military airport in the heart of Silicon Valley. That gave him plenty of time to enjoy the view, including glimpses of the Golden Gate Bridge and downtown San Francisco’s glittering lights.

“It’s a fantastic moment,” Piccard, a Swiss psychiatrist and adventurer, told Mission Control. “But you know, I would be ready to continue. Just the fact of being able to fly so long is just a miracle.”

Piccard and Solar Impulse’s other co-founder, Andre Borschberg, are alternating the flying duties for the round-the-world trip. Borschberg is due to take the next leg of the trip, heading for Phoenix. The plane will make its way across the U.S. mainland, then take on a challenging trans-Atlantic flight onward to Europe.

The odyssey is due to end up this summer where it began, in Abu Dhabi.

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