Man’s pioneering spirit has taken him from strength to strength, The Wright Brothers a little more than a century ago put the man into the skies and spawned a new aviation industry. Aircrafts use aviation fuel from petroleum, a fossil non-renewable fuel. Man has aimed to replace this by renewable and non-polluting clean fuel. Soalar energy has been tapped to generate electric power which can be used to propel the aircraft during daytime and store the power in lithium batteries to fly at night. Previous prototypes of the solar powered plane have been successful. Such planes have successfully flown at a height, during night for 26 hours and has crossed the seas — Atlantic and Mediterranean.Depending on this experience, an advanced version of this plane called Solar Impulse 2 or Si2 has been developed, and it has completed its test flight on Monday, 2nd March, 2015. Si2 was piloted from Abu Dhabi by the company chairman Bertrand Piccard. It is now all set to go for a round the world trip from Abu Dhabi and it will be the first plane to do so. The flight will commence on Saturday, 7th March,2015 if weather permits.It will return to Abu Dhabi in July or August, 2015. Its routeof 35,000 km is Oman, India — Ahmedabad and Varanasi,China, Myanmar, Hawaii and continental US. Across Atlantic, it will have stop overs in Southern Europe or North Africa before coming back to Abu Dhabi. Si2 has 17000 solar cells.
The plane weighs 2300 KG. It is thus a light plane. The whole trip will take 25 flight days. It will cruise at a speed of 140 km per hour. Its wing span is 72 metres and is wider than that of Boeing.The whole project is developed at Payerne in Switzerland.Project cost is $150 millon. The feasibility studies have been spread over 12 years.The team consists of 80 technicians.
Two pilots and co-founders will mange the flight — Piccard and Andre Boschberg.
On July 26, 2016, the solar plane completed its round-the-world flight by returning to Abu Dhabi from where it took off on this 40000-km journey over a year ago.
As we know, it is a Swiss-engineered plane which commenced its journey in March, 2015. It made 16 stops across the world. The two pilots are Bertrand Piccard and Andre Borschberg. As it is a single seater plane, both the pilots took turns to fly it. The last leg was flown by Piccard who was greeted by his fellow pilot Borschberg at Abu Dhabi on completion of the journey.
The plane weighed 23000 kg, a weight of a mid-sized trunk. An empty Boeing weighs 1.8 lac kg. To steady it during take offs and landings, the plane was guided by runners and bicyclists.It is a carbon-fibre plane.
During a flight from Japan to Hawaii, its batteries were damaged and this caused a delay of nine months. Piccard fell ill before its last leg from Cairo to Abu Dhabi and that caused a delay of a week.
In its entire journey Solar Impulse completed 500 flight hours. The average speed was between 45 kmph to 90 kmph. It made stops in India, Myanmar, China, Japan, US, Spain, Italy and Egypt.