Swiss adventurer Bertrand Piccard completed one of the most challenging legs of a bid to circumnavigate the globe in a solar-powered aircraft, touching down in Mountain View, California, on Saturday night after a grueling 62-hour flight from Hawaii.
It was an important milestone on the slow but steady journey of the Solar Impulse 2, which flies day and night by relying on 17,000 solar cells built into its 72-meter wingspan. The Si2 took off from Abu Dhabi in March 2015 and reached Kalaeloa, Hawaii before a damaged battery pack and unfavorable weather conditions forced the team to postpone the rest of its Pacific crossing for nine months.
"This flight was a huge step in the adventure and Bertrand Piccard accomplished it like a professional pilot," the team's other pilot, André Borschberg, said in a statement.
Landing at Mountain View's Moffett Airfield in the heart of Silicon Valley was also a symbolic milestone, since the field has hosted multiple innovative efforts to improve flight. It's home to NASA's Ames Research Center, and in 2014, Google subsidiary Planetary Ventures announced a $1.16 billion deal to build a research facility for space, aviation, and drone technology. Piccard told the San Jose Mercury News he was proud to arrive where "so many people think outside the box."
He had a lot of free time on his hands during the 62-hour flight in the cramped 3.8-meter cockpit. So the team came up with a few ways to keep him occupied when he wasn't attending to flying duties. Those included patching him in to U.N. headquarters in New York on Earth Day, where he had a live conversation with U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon in front of 500 world leaders.
The conversation came just after the U.N. delegates signed the Paris Climate Agreement, and Ban Ki-moon thanked Piccard and his team for their leadership in advancing environmentally sustainable flight.
The next legs of SI2's journey will take it across North America, with stops planned for Phoenix, somewhere in the Midwest, and New York City. It will then cross the Atlantic, stopping in Europe and North Africa before concluding the flight back in Abu Dhabi.