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FORTUNE: All-Solar Plane Completes Historic Pacific Crossing
Solar Impulse 2, a long-distance plane powered entirely by solar energy, touched down late last night at Moffett Airfield in Mountain View, California, after a 62 hour flight from Hawaii.
The flight came after a nine-month pause in the plane’s planned circumnavigation of the Earth, a project intended to highlight environmental issues and clean technology.
The trip is now a little over halfway complete.
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HUFFINGTON POST: Plane Flies Across The Pacific Using Only Solar Power
Bertrand Piccard landed the single-pilot plane, Solar Impulse 2, in Mountain View, California, on Saturday night after taking off from Hawaii 62 hours prior. Since setting off from Abu Dhabi in March 2015, Piccard and fellow pilot Andre Borschberg have taken turns flying the plane as part of their mission to fly it around the world.
“It’s a new era. It’s not science fiction. It’s today,” Piccard said on CNN after landing. “It exists and clean technologies can do the impossible.”
“This flight was a huge step in the adventure and Bertrand Piccard accomplished it like a professional pilot,” Borschberg, who led the construction of the plane, said in a statement.
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CNN: Solar Impulse 2 lands in California after Pacific flight
Images of the elegant solar aircraft, which has the wingspan of a Boeing 747 but only weighs about as much as an SUV, flying over the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco Bay mark a significant achievement. The team has seen the project beset with problems and setbacks during its pioneering airborne circumnavigation.
"I'm very happy that everything works extremely well and the airplane is functioning as it should," Piccard's business partner and the plane's other pilot, Swiss engineer Andre Borschberg, told CNN by phone from California just ahead of the successful, on-schedule landing. "It's a demonstration that the tech is reliable."
The plane took off from Hawaii on Thursday, resuming a journey that had stalled on the island of Oahu for almost 10 months.
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VOX: The solar-powered plane Solar Impulse 2 just made a historic trip across the Pacific
One of the plane's two pilots, Bertrand Piccard, is a direct descendent of those earlier inventors, carrying on a family tradition of breaking records.
He's the grandson of Auguste Piccard, a Swiss physicist who took a hydrogen balloon to the stratosphere in 1931 — the highest a human being had ever traveled. (Auguste Piccard became the model for Professor Calculus in the Tintin comics, an absent-minded professor who invents spectacular devices.)
Then, in 1960, Auguste's son, Jacques Piccard, was the first person to explore the deepest part of the ocean, the Mariana Trench, in a capsule called a bathyscaphe that he had designed himself — going deeper than any human being before.
And Bertrand Piccard has already added his own record to the family's pile: He was the first to complete a nonstop air balloon flight around the world. If all goes well, he and his co-pilot, André Borschberg, will become the first to circumnavigate the world in a solar plane as well.
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