Solar Impulse 2 Breaks Three Records En Route To Hawaii

Zothecula writes: Solar Impulse 2 has started smashing records even before the longest leg of its round-the-world flight is complete. At around three quarters of the way to its next touch down in Hawaii, the single-pilot aircraft has broken the world records for longest distance and duration for solar aviation, with the record for longest ever solo flight of any kind thrown in for good measure.

Comments

Re:what?

[gstoddart]

I don't care about a plane making a series of relatively short flights under optimal conditions (daylight), and I don't see why anyone else does either.

Well, that doesn't seem to be what is happening:

Solar Impulse 2 took off from Nagoya, Japan on Sunday for its audacious five-day flight across the Pacific Ocean to Hawaii with Swiss pilot and Solar Impulse co-founder Andre Borschberg at the helm. It has since stayed in the air for three days and nights without using a single drop of fuel, grabbing the distance and duration records, 5,663 km (3,518 mi) and 80 hours respectively, in the process.

This isn't some jet engine which does this in a few hours.

You can whine all you want, but the records are real.

They're for solar aviation, which means it's a lot harder and a lot slower.

Call us back when you've done better.

More elegant: arctic tern

[Framboise]

Birds too fly around the world using clean solar energy. Arctic tern fly twice a year
half the globe with no huge ground navigation and support team
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_tern