Solar Impulse completes California to Arizona leg

A solar-powered airplanemidway through a historic bid to circle the globe completed the10th leg of its journey on Monday, landing in Arizona after a16-hour flight from California, the project team said.

The Swiss team flying the aircraft in a campaign to buildsupport for clean energy technologies hopes eventually to complete its circumnavigation in Abu Dhabi, where the journey began in March 2015.

The spindly, single-seat experimental aircraft, dubbed SolarImpulse 2, arrived in Phoenix shortly before 9 p.m., following aflight from San Francisco that took it over the Mojave Desert.

• SolarImpulse 2 makesrisky flight over Pacific

The flight would have taken a conventional airplane just twohours, but the solar craft's cruising speed, akin to that of a car, required pilots to take up meditation and hypnosis intraining to stay alert for long periods.

Occupying the tiny cockpit for the trip was projectco-founder Andre Borschberg, who alternates with fellow pilot Bertrand Piccardat the controls for each segment of what theyhope will be the first round-the-world solar-powered flight.

"I made it to Phoenix, what an amazing flight over theMojave desert," Borschberg said in a Twitter post.

Borschberg was the pilot for the Japan-to-Hawaii trip overthe Pacific last July, staying airborne for nearly 118 hours.

That shattered the 76-hour world duration record for anon-stop, solo flight set in 2006 by the late American adventurer Steve Fossettin his Virgin Atlantic Global Flyer. Italso set new duration and distance records for solar-poweredflight.

The feat, however, dealt a setback to the Solar Impulse,which suffered severe battery damage, requiring repairs and
testing that grounded it in Hawaii for nine months.

Not a drop of conventional fuel

Piccard completed the trans-Pacific crossing last month,reaching San Francisco after a flight of nearly three days, morethan three times the 18 hours Amelia Earhart took to fly solofrom Hawaii to California in the 1930s.

The biggest difference is that the propeller-driven SolarImpulse flies without a drop of fuel, its four engines powered solely byenergy collected from more than 17,000 solar cellsbuilt into its wings.

• The plane was damaged in Japan

Surplus power is stored in four batteries during the day, tokeep the plane aloft on extreme long-distance flights.

The carbon-fibreplane, with a wingspan exceeding that of aBoeing 747 and the weight of a family car, is unlikely to set speed or altitude records. It can climb to 8,500 metresand cruise at 55 to 100 km/h.

In a precursor of their globe-circling quest, the two mencompleted a multi-flight crossing of the United States with an earlier version of the solar plane in 2013.