Bad weather forces Japan stopover for solar plane
Print Edition
SOLAR Impulse 2, the solar-powered plane attempting to circle the globe without a drop of fuel made an unscheduled landing in Japan last night to wait out bad weather.
Its Swiss pilot had left the Chinese city of Nanjing on Sunday for Hawaii on what was to be the longest leg of the journey.
The record-breaking aircraft landed safely at Nagoya Airport in central Japan.
Elke Neumann, a spokeswoman for the Solar Impulse project, said from Nanjing that the team first noticed the bad weather pattern about 36 hours ago.
“We thought we might go through it,” she said. “But between Japan and Hawaii there’s no place to stop.”
The safety of the pilot and the plane are a priority, and they will likely wait a few days in Japan until the weather changes, she said.
The plane landed after scheduled flights at the airport ended around 10pm.
Solar Impulse 2 needs room to land, so it generally avoids times when commercial flights are operating, Neuman said.
The plane also usually lands at night, because the winds tend to be lower. It needs wind to be no more than 10 knots.
“We are a little bit sad, because everything’s functioning perfectly. The batteries are charging, there’s enough sun, the pilot is in good health, he’s in good condition. It’s all working well,” Neumann said.
The journey started in March in Abu Dhabi, and the plane has stopped in Oman, India, Myanmar and China. The flight from Nanjing to Hawaii is the seventh of 12 flights and the riskiest.
The seventh leg of the round-the-world journey was set to take pilot Andre Borschberg, 62, on a six-day, six-night flight from Nanjing across the Pacific to Hawaii, an 8,500 kilometer flight.
The bold attempt was called off just after 3pm yesterday. “When we took off from China it was quite clear we could cross the front,” Bertrand Piccard, the plane’s other pilot, said on a live video posted on YouTube.
“It was almost easy I would say, the weatherman was very confident. Now the window has closed. The front is too thick, too big. The plane would have to go through big layers of cloud.
“The only safe decision is to stop in Nagoya, wait a few days before carrying on.”
Borschberg completed Solar Impulse 2’s first overnight leg, with the aircraft relying solely on batteries that had been charged by the sun’s energy.
Speaking on Saturday hours before departure from Nanjing, Borschberg told reporters that the plane could land in Japan in case of problems, but the ocean offered no such possibility.
“In case of emergency, we have Japan on the way, so we have identified airports where we could stop but this only really is in case of very difficult technical problems,” Borschberg said. “As soon as we leave this part of the world, we are in the open sea. There is no way to come back.”
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