The solar-powered aircraft Solar Impulse 2, and its 236-foot wingspan, flies over the Golden Gate in San Francisco, Calif., late Saturday afternoon, April 23, 2016, enroute to Moffett Airfield in Mountain View, Calif. (Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group)
After a 56-hour flight from Hawaii, his every word webcast live from the skies, the pilot of a solar-powered plane on an around-the-world journey reached the San Francisco Bay late Saturday afternoon, enthralled and inspired by the stunning scene below.
“Right now, I am crossing the coastline of California entering into the continent, and exactly in front of me is the Golden Gate,” pilot Bertrand Piccard told colleagues tracking his travels on the Internet. Over “the centuries, all these ships were coming like this” through the Golden Gate, “and now it’s a solar-powered airplane.”
Piccard landed the Solar Impulse 2 in Mountain View at 11:45 p.m. The plane taxied into a huge tent erected on Moffett Airfield, where Piccard was greeted by the project’s team.
MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA – APRIL 23: In this handout image supplied by Jean Revillard, Swiss pilot Bertrand Piccard of Solar powered plane ‘Solar Impulse 2′, celebrates after a flight from Hawaii during its circumnavigation, at Moffett Airfield in Silicon Valley, on April 23, 2016 in Mountain View, California. The Solar Impulse 2 is equipped with 17,000 solar cells, has a wingspan of 72 metres, and yet weighs just over 2 tonnes. (Photo by Jean Revillard via Getty Images) ( Handout )
“You know there was a moment in the night, I was watching the reflection of the moon on the ocean and I was thinking ‘I’m completely alone in this tiny cockpit and I feel completely confident.’ And I was really thankful to life for bringing me this experience,” Piccard said at a news conference after he landed. “It’s maybe this is one of the most fantastic experiences of life I’ve had.”
Reaching shoreline of the U.S. mainland was a major milestone and one of the most challenging legs for the Solar Impulse 2.
It is the first airplane of Swiss pioneers Piccard and André Borschberg to fly day and night without using a drop of fuel, propelled solely by energy from the sun.
Borschberg, who had flown the leg from Japan to Hawaii, was aboard a helicopter to welcome Piccard as he approached the Bay Area.
The aircraft started its globe-circling journey in March 2015 from Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, and made stops in Jordan, Myanmar, China and Japan. It is on the ninth leg of its circumnavigation.
In a telephone interview with ABC7 News early Saturday night, Piccard called his impending arrival to Silicon Valley the perfect venue because it’s “where innovation … and so many people think outside the box.”
“For me, arriving with a solar-powered airplane shows me a completely different type of future,” Piccard said.
Once he gets to the valley, Piccard said, he plans to meet with his friends from Google, which a year ago took over 1,000 acres of Moffett with plans to repurpose its three airship hangars as laboratories for developing robots, rovers, drones and Internet-carrying balloons.
Piccard told ABC7 he was moved that Bay Area residents were so interested in watching his plane traveling miles overhead Saturday.
“It’s is an adventure we want to share with the public,” Piccard said. “In our world, there are so many things that go bad,” from pollution to wars, poverty to natural disasters.
Solar Impulse 2 lands at Moffett Field in Mountain View, Calif., after crossing the Pacific Ocean on Saturday, April 23, 2016. The solar-powered airplane landed in California on Saturday, completing a risky, three-day flight across the Pacific Ocean as part of its journey around the world. (AP Photo/Noah Berger) ( Noah Berger )
The trans-Pacific leg of his journey was considered the riskiest part of the solar plane’s global travels because of the lack of emergency landing sites. After uncertainty about winds, the plane took off from Hawaii on Thursday morning.
At one point, passengers on a Hawaiian Air jet caught a glimpse of the Solar Impulse 2 before the airliner sped past the slow-moving aircraft.
The plane had landed in Hawaii in July and was forced to stay on the islands after its battery system sustained heat damage on its trip from Japan.
The team was delayed in Asia as well. When first attempting to fly from Nanjing, China, to Hawaii, the crew had to divert to Japan because of unfavorable weather and a damaged wing.
A month later, when weather conditions were right, the plane departed from Nagoya in central Japan for Hawaii.
The plane’s ideal flight speed is about 45 kph, or 28 mph, though that can double during the day when the sun’s rays are strongest. The carbon-fiber aircraft weighs more than 5,000 pounds, or about as much as a midsize truck.
The wings of Solar Impulse 2, which stretch wider than those of a Boeing 747, are equipped with 17,000 solar cells that power propellers and charge batteries. The plane runs on stored energy at night.
After Mountain View, the plane will head to Phoenix.
During the interview Saturday night, Piccard recalled being inspired as a child living in the U.S., close to Cape Canaveral, Florida, where he witnessed some of NASA’s launches to the moon and met “most of the astronauts,” who inspired him to dream.
He said if he and his team could do the same for others, “that would be fantastic.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report. Contact Tracy Seipel at 408-920-5343. Follow her at Twitter.com/taseipel.
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