A solar-powered airplane finished crossing the United States on Saturday, landing in New York City after flying over the Statue of Liberty during its historic bid to circle the globe, the project team said. The spindly, single-seat experimental aircraft, dubbed Solar Impulse 2, arrived at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport at about 4 a.m. local time after it took off about five hours beforehand at Lehigh Valley International Airport in Pennsylvania, the team reported on the airplane's website. Such a pleasure to land in New York! For the 14th time we celebrate sustainability," said the project's co-founder Andre Borschberg on Twitter after flying over the city and the Statue of Liberty during the 14th leg of the trip around the globe. The Swiss team flying the aircraft in a campaign to build support for clean energy technologies hopes eventually to complete its circumnavigation in Abu Dhabi, where the journey began in March 2015. The solar cr...
Investigators say a Virgin Galactic spaceship crash was caused by structural failure after the co-pilot unlocked a braking system early. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) says resulting aerodynamic forces caused the brakes to be actually deployed, tearing apart the craft. The NTSB has been probing what caused the craft to break up over the Mojave Desert in a test flight 10 months ago. The accident killed co-pilot Michael Alsbury and badly injured the pilot.The Virgin Galactic's SpaceShip Two space tourism craft was flying a manned test last October when it experienced what the company described at the time as "a serious anomaly". It had been undergoing a powered test flight over the desert north of Los Angeles.
"Many of the safety issues that we will hear about today arose not from the novelty of a space launch test flight, but from human factors that were already known elsewhere in transportation," he added. Both pilots were employed by Scaled Composites, the company that designed the craft.
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