Solar Impulse Set Record for Solar-powered Flight Across Atlantic

Inhabitat reported the experimental solar-powered aircraft, dubbed as “Solar Impulse 2” made aircraft history when it landed down in Seville, Spain after a 3-day, nonstop flight from New York City. The flight and landing marks ever the first solar, electric and zero-emission crossing of the Atlantic Ocean.

The climax of a partnership between two Swiss pilots Bertrand Piccard and Andre Borscberg, Solar Impulse 2 is sure to get another historic world record for this accomplishment. It’s the latest in a series of firsts in the aircraft’s around-the-world journey.

Bertrand Piccard has undergone 3 days and 3 nights or 71 hours and 8 minutes in the one-man aircraft, covering 4,203 miles without refuelling. The all-electric plane gets all its power through the solar panels, which charges the plane’s batteries during the day to be used to power the plane at night flight. Piccard landed the solar aircraft at the Seville Airport at 7:38am local time, which ended the epic ocean crossing. Ground crews have already set to work evaluating the plane’s performance and checking for failures to ensure that everything is in good condition before Andre Borschberg takes off on the next stage of the journey.

Last year, it was Borschberg who piloted the solar plane when it successfully flew across the Pacific Ocean from Japan to Hawaii. Each leg of this historic journey seems to deepen the pilot’s resolve about the power of clean energy and its importance on a global scale. Following Piccard’s landing in Spain, he stated that the Atlantic has always revealed the transitions between the old and new worlds. The old world is the time of inefficient, polluting devices, which depletes the Earth’s resources. The new world represents the modern, clean technologies that can halve the global energy consumption, improve people’s quality of life and save the planet’s natural resources.

The transatlantic flight’s aim is to inspire to inspire the adoption of clean technologies around the world. The Spain landing marked the 15^th leg of the experimental solar-powered aircraft’s around the world journey that has begun in Abu Dhabi last March. The team is expecting 2 more flights to complete the global adventure.

Click here to read the full story on Inhabitat

Image credit: vox.com