Solar Impulse, landing in Cairo after two days of flight – The Republic

ROME – Mission accomplished. It ‘landed in Cairo Solar Impulse 2 , the solar-powered plane that travels without a drop of fuel. This is the penultimate leg of his world tour before the back to Abu Dhabi where he started March 9, 2015 . L ‘ solar plane took off from Spain two days ago. At the stage that connected Seville to Cairo, Solar Impulse 2 was piloted by the Swiss, André Borschberg , the cloche for the last time in this adventure. For the seventeenth and final stage, Solar Impulse 2 will be on the other led Swiss rider Bertrand Piccard , who is also director of the project and that will lead him to conclude his circumnavigation.

Heavy 1.5 tons but the size of a Boeing 747, the solar Impulse proceeds at an average speed of about 50 kilometers per hour thanks to batteries that store solar energy captured by some 17,000 solar cells fitted on the wings. “And ‘was fantastic, everything went very well,” he exclaimed the Swiss Borschberg in communication with the aircraft’s control center in Monaco, live on the internet. “I saw all the countries, Algeria, Tunisia, Italy (…) it was great, I saw everything,” he added. His plane also flew over the Pyramids of Giza and the Sphinx before landing at Cairo airport.

So far, its stages were Muscat (Oman), Ahmedabad and Varanasi (India), Mandalay (Burma), and Chongqing Nanjing (China) and Nagoya (Japan) then crossing the Pacific to Hawaii (USA), where he had an unforeseen technical delay of several months, before reaching and crossing the North America, stopping in San Francisco, Phoenix, Tulsa, Dayton , Lehigh Valley and New York. Then had crossed the Atlantic to land in Seville on June 23 and today in Cairo.

Topics:

solar impulse

around the world

landing

solar

Cairo

Starring:

Bertrand Piccard

André Borschberg