Around The World With No Fuel - The World's First Solar Flight Lands Safely This Week

Around The World With No Fuel - The World's First Solar Flight Lands Safely This Week

In 2013, the Energy Hub looked at the first solar flight to cross the US, undertaken by Swiss entrepreneur Andre Borschberg and psychiatrist Bertrand Piccard in their ground-breaking aircraft - Solar Impulse.

Three years later they completed the impossible - circumnavigating the entire globe fuelled purely by solar power in the upgraded Solar Impulse 2. Having taken off in March 2015, the flight was undertaken across 17 legs, in sometimes extremely challenging conditions. The cockpit had just enough space for the pilot, instruments, chair and a small amount of food and water. Pilots were only allowed to sleep for 20 minutes at a time - alarms would ensure that this would happen.

This tremendous effort has been in pursuit of spreading their simple yet substantial message:
'Everybody could use the plane's technologies on the ground to halve our world's energy consumption, save natural resources and improve our quality of life...those solutions bring opportunities to create jobs, make profit, sustain the growth of the industry, and at the same time protect the environment.'

WIRED has been covering their incredible journey from the beginning - read more about it here..