Solar Impulse 2 takes off from California

The Masdar-sponsored plane, piloted by Andre Borschberg, took off from California and is headed to Arizona.

ABU DHABI // Solar Impulse 2 took off at 4pm UAE time on Monday from Northern California en route to Arizona on the 10th leg of its fuel-free attempt to circumnavigate the world.

After identifying a suitable weather window for the next leg of their North American flight, Andre Borschberg will pilot the solar-powered plane for more than 16 hours as he transverses deserts and mountains on his way to the city of Phoenix, Arizona’s capital.

“We fly over desert today and over high mountains. It’s very warm, so it can create turbulence from pressure influences. So that will be the challenge today, but we have good weather and it’s well coordinated, so we should have a good flight today,” he said on Monday.

Mission control in Monaco has plotted a flight path for Borschberg to fly through well-known areas such as the Mojave Desert and the Sierra Nevada mountain range, while avoiding restricted military zones.

Within the first hour of his flight on Monday, the Swiss pilot crossed San Francisco Bay and flew into Sierra Nevada before taking a south-easterly path towards Phoenix.

The Masdar-sponsored aircraft began its attempt to circle the world in March last year. It flew from Abu Dhabi to Oman, India, Myanmar, China, Japan and finally the United States.

After completing that leg, the Solar Impulse 2 team plans to make one more US stop, in the east coast, before undertaking a record-breaking attempt at crossing the Atlantic.

“The Nasa base reminds me of my childhood in Cape Canaveral and the Apollo missions,” Bertrand Piccard, Solar Impulse’s co-founder and co-pilot, said yesterday when he was with Borschberg at Moffett Federal Airfield, a common testing ground for US space programmes.

Piccard broke an aviation record by crossing the US three years ago in a prototype version of Solar Impulse 2. He said that it was one of the more pleasurable journeys he had made.

“Exactly three years ago, I took off from here to start the cross-America flight,” he said.

“ Now it’s his [Borschberg] turn and it’s a beautiful flight because you go from the greenery of San Francisco and transition into the desert, the colours begin to change.”

The team hopes to reach New York before crossing the Atlantic Ocean into Europe, and then returning to Abu Dhabi.

“This is something we started 13 years ago. It’s a long process we have built step by step, there has been a lot of learning,” said Borschberg.

“But Bertrand and I have a vision for the future.”