The Swiss-made Solar Impulse plane landed in Dallas in the early morning hours on Thursday, breaking the distance record for a solar-powered flight on the second leg of its coast-to-coast odyssey across America.
The super-light, super-wide plane rose from its runway at Phoenix's Sky Harbor International Airport at 4:47 a.m. Mountain Time on Wednesday with Andre Borschberg, Solar Impulse's co-founder and CEO, at the controls. He guided the plane through Arizona, New Mexico and West Texas. The plane took off at sunrise in Phoenix, and landed at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport well after the sun went down, at 1:08 a.m. Central Time on Thursday.
The flight took more than 18 hours, setting a pace that didn't break any speed records. You could have driven between Phoenix and Dallas in less time, and most commercial jets make the trip in two hours or less, but the 830-mile (1,336-kilometer) trek set a new distance record for a single solar-powered flight. Borschberg set the previous record, 693 miles (1,116 kilometers), last year during a Solar Impulse flight from Switzerland to Spain.
The Solar Impulse project began in 2003 with a 10-year budget of 90 million euros ($115 million), backed by Swiss sponsors. The plane is designed to demonstrate a host of clean-energy technologies, ranging from lightweight carbon composites to the 12,000 photovoltaic cell solar-cell system that powers the plane's motors. The airplane is as light as a typical passenger car, but its wingspan matches the width of a jumbo jet.
On Wednesday, the plane ranged as high in altitude as 27,000 feet, soaking up the sun's energy as it went. "The more I fly, the more energy I have aboard the airplane," Borschberg said.
After Dallas-Fort Worth, the plane is scheduled to move on to St. Louis, and then to Washington, D.C. The final leg of the trip, from Washington to New York, is expected to come sometime around the Fourth of July.
Borschberg said the coast-to-coast trip will serve as a warm-up for a round-the-world, solar-powered odyssey in 2015.
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