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...
The plane began the stage on Wednesday in Dayton, Ohio, travelling 1,044km to reach the East Coast waypoint. The journey is the 13th leg in a quest that started in Abu Dhabi last year to circumnavigate the globe on zero fuel. Swiss adventurer Bertrand Piccard was in the pilot's seat of the 72m-wingspan, electric plane. The aircraft took off from Dayton International Airport at 04:02 local time (08:02 GMT). It landed in Lehigh Valley at 20:49 local time (00:49 GMT, Thursday). The achievement positions the project to make its entry into New York in the coming days.
The "Big Apple" is set to be the base for Solar Impulse as it waits for a weather window to fly the Atlantic. Deciding when to cross the ocean will be a tricky decision. The slow-moving, ultra-light plane needs benign winds, and the team concedes that the right conditions may not present themselves for several weeks.Wednesday's flight to Lehigh Valley was postponed for 24 hours for checks on the aircraft following a power problem in its mobile hangar.
The air fans that hold up the inflatable structure briefly failed on Tuesday, allowing the canvas to collapse and touch the plane's fuselage and the wings. Once engineers had concluded that Solar Impulse had not been affected in any way, they cleared the mission to resume. The hop to New York will likely occur next week, after the Memorial Day weekend. Although it is a short distance from Lehigh Valley to John F Kennedy Airport, the time taken to complete the leg will be extended by two factors.
One is the desire to fly around the Statue of Liberty to take some pictures; the other will be the wait for air traffic controllers to find a landing slot at one of the busiest airports in the world. "It's going to be a long flight - more than 26 hours. But it's going to be extraordinary because it will be so symbolic to be at [the Statue of Liberty]," said Andre Borschberg, who will pilot the stage. "I was just visiting the Wright Brothers museum here in Dayton, and one of the flights he did - I think it was Orville - was the first airplane flight over the Statue of Liberty. He didn't have to deal with co-ordinating the traffic because he knew there was nobody else, no other airplane flying at the time!"The project has made excellent progress since renewing its global challenge a month ago in Hawaii.
From Kalaeloa in the central Pacific, it flew to Mountain View, California; and from there it reached across to Phoenix, Arizona, then to Tulsa, Oklahoma, before landing in Dayton on Saturday In 2015, Solar Impulse flew eight stages from Abu Dhabi to Kalaeloa, including a remarkable 4-day, 21-hour leg over the western Pacific - the longest (time duration) flight in aviation history.
It was damage to its batteries on that stage, however, that forced Solar Impulse to lay up for 10 months, for repairs and to wait for optimum daylight length in the northern hemisphere to return.
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