PACIFIC FLIGHT UNVEILS THE WORLD'S VERY FIRST SOLAR POWERED PLANE THAT DEPENDS ON SOLAR ENERGY

An experimental plane flying around the world without a single drop of fuel landed in California after a two-and-a-half day flight across the Pacific.
Piloted by Swiss explorer and psychiatrist Bertrand Piccard, Solar Impulse 2 touched down in Mountain View just before midnight (3 a.m. ET).
“It’s a new era. It’s not science fiction. It’s today,” Piccard told CNN from California after his successful voyage. “It exists and clean technologies can do the impossible.”
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.
It lifted off just before sunrise Friday to cheers and applause. On arrival into the skies above California, it flew holding patterns for several hours above San Francisco Bay in celebration of the achievement.
As dusk fell over the city, the team posted striking images on its social media accounts.
Because the plane travels at about the same speed as a car, the Hawaii-California leg took just over 62 hours to complete.
While Piccard was at the controls for this ninth leg of the round-the-world trip, he and Borschberg, take turns flying the plane solo.
The flight has benefited from a “very stable weather window,” Solar Impulse spokeswoman Alexandra Gindroz said, and is expected to touch down on schedule.
The solar plane looks like a giant high-tech dragonfly and requires near-perfect conditions to fly.
After all, it’s the weather -- particularly the sun -- that ultimately decides the schedule of this journey, even with dozens of engineers and experts monitoring the plane’s every move.
“Nobody’s done this before,” managing director Gregory Blatt said. “There’s no guidebook. There’s no best practice.”
The team has learned this the hard way.