Solar plane Solar Impulse 2 completes trip around the world
The Solar Impulse 2 landed at 02:05 a.m. Monday in Abu Dhabi where the solar plane began its circumnavigation of the globe on March 9, 2015. The seventeenth and final leg of the flight around the world started 48 hours and 37 minutes earlier in Cairo.
The last part of the 40,000 kilometer journey flew Bertrand Piccard. Piccard started the project thirteen years ago together with the Swiss engineer André Borschberg. On landing Piccard said: “The future is bright, the future is you, the future is now, let’s take that one step further.”
The final leg from Cairo crossed the Red Sea via Saudi Arabia over Bahrain and Qatar to land in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates. The flight followed the 3745-kilometer leg between Seville in Spain and Cairo that took the aircraft 48 hours and 50 minutes, just 13 minutes longer than the time it took to cover the 2794-kilometer distance of the last leg.
The aircraft itself has a wingspan of 68 meters, which is the size of a Boeing 747. The solar aircraft weighs only 2300 kilograms instead of the 300 tons of a 747. At the top the aircraft is covered with a total of 17,000 solar cells that drive the four-meter propellers that are powered by four electric motors.
The Solar Impulse 2 is sensitive to bad weather conditions, forcing the flight over the Pacific Ocean to be postponed for almost a year because damage to the batteries prevented the flight from Nagoya in Japan to Hawaii in time. That was immediately the longest distance of 8924 kilometers. The pilot at that distance was Borschberg who took 118 hours. The longest flight would initially go from Nanjing in China to Hawaii, but the plane had to land in Nagoya. The distance from Nanjing to Hawaii was 9132 kilometers and should have taken about 144 hours.
Piccard covered the second longest distance across the Atlantic from New York to Seville at 6265 kilometers in 71 hours and 8 minutes.
The team will now continue to promote clean technologies in aviation, as well as sun-powered clean unmanned aircraft that fly much higher so that there are no influences from bad weather or disturbing normal aircraft. These types of autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles could in many cases replace the need for satellites.