The Solar Impulse 2, a solar aircraft and “flying laboratory” intended to raise awareness for green technologies, has been delayed on its flight from the Lehigh Valley Airport in Pennsylvania to New York City, scheduled for early this morning. The flight was postponed due to rain.
Solar Impulse 2 has been on this journey since March 9, 2015 with a goal of circling the world in 17 separate flight stages, completing its flight where it began, in Abu Dhabi.
(AP Photo)Lead by Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg, the latest leg of the journey was scheduled to end in New York City at John F. Kennedy Airport at around 4 a.m. this morning. The planned flight included the plane flying over the Statue of Liberty.
The zero-fuel aircraft has already broken records for being the first zero-fuel vehicle to achieve an oceanic crossing, a five-day journey from Japan to Hawaii. While it isn’t the first airplane run entirely on solar power, it is the first to fly both day and night using only solar energy stored in the on-board electric batteries.
The wide, flat-winged plane is extraordinarily light for its weight, with a weight of 2.3 tons and a wingspan of 72 meters.
A team of 80 engineers and technicians worked on it. Their most important tasks were to make hyper-efficient energy storage and the propulsion systems that could run on it, which involved both maximum use of the power soaked up by the solar panels and minimum energy consumption on board.
More updates about the Solar Impulse 2’s flight into New York are expected to be forthcoming.
