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| Swiss-made Solar-powered aircraft the Solar Impulse piloted by Bertrand Piccard of Switzerland prepares for take-off from Rabat on June 21, 2012 for a voyage across the Moroccan desert to Ouarzazate. AFP Photo/ Abdelhak Senna) |
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A
solar-powered plane early Friday completed a flight over the Moroccan desert to
showcase renewable energy, as a key summit in Rio discussed “greening” the
world economy.
The
Swiss-made Solar Impulse landed in Ouarzazate at 26 minutes after midnight
(2326 GMT) after having taken off from Rabat at dawn on Thursday.
“Once
again, the flight was magnificent,” Borschberg said shortly before landing.
Earlier,
during the flight, pilot Andre Borschberg told AFP by satellite telephone from
his cockpit said he was optimistic about the chances of success.
“The sky is
magnificently beautiful and I am pretty confident of arriving at the
destination,” pilot Andre Borschberg said.
“I can see
far away the Moroccan coast in a superb blue... Today everything seems
possible. In Ouarzazate, the weather forecast is good,” he added.
“Mother
Nature seems to be more favorable than the last time.”
An earlier
attempt to reach Ouarzazate last week was foiled by rough conditions but the
giant sun-powered plane.
When
Borschberg made his first attempt to cross the desert on June 13, he had to
turn round because of strong winds and turbulence near the Atlas mountains.
This was
the final stage of a trip that has taken him from his native Switzerland to
Spain and then to Morocco.
Earlier
this month, fellow inventor and adventurer Bertrand Piccard — who made the
first non-stop around-the-world balloon flight 13 years ago — flew Solar
Impulse from Madrid to Rabat.
It was the
first-ever flight between two continents by an aircraft that does not require a
single drop of fuel.
“Our
journey shows that there are other ways of saving energy and of saving the
environment and the planet,” Borschberg told AFP from the cockpit of his plane,
which looks like a giant glider.
At one
point, about half-way into the final and toughest leg of the solar plane’s trip,
the craft was flying over the Atlantic towards the port city of Casablanca at a
speed of about 62 kilometers per hour (38.6 mph).
Friday’s
landing point, Ouarzazate, is where the Moroccan authorities plan to build the
largest solar power station in the world.
Speaking of
his foiled bid the previous week, Borschberg said people “should not talk of
failure, but of experience. It’s training, you learn a lot of things.”
The flight
was described as the most challenging Solar Impulse has yet faced because of
the arid, baking hot nature of the terrain and the proximity of the mountains,
which are more than 3,000 meters (9,800 feet) high.
The giant
high-tech aircraft, which has the wingspan of a jumbo jet but weighs no more
than a medium-sized car, is fitted with 12,000 solar cells feeding four
electric motors driving propellers.
Ouarzazate
is 550 kilometers (340 miles) from the Moroccan capital. The flight took more
than 17 and a half hours, slightly more than the 16 hours they had estimated.
But the
prototype aircraft has a slow speed and was to some extent at the mercy of the
unpredictable climate.
The flight
has been jointly organized by the Swiss Solar Impulse company and the Moroccan
agency for solar energy (Masen0.
Masen is
responsible for building a power station with an initial capacity of 160
megawatts and plans to raise this capacity to about 500 MW to 2015.
Last month,
the solar-powered plane made the 2,500-kilometer (1,550-mile) journey from
Madrid to Rabat, its longest to date and its first between continents, after an
inaugural flight to Paris and Brussels last year.
The flights
are intended as a rehearsal for the goal of a round-the-world trip in 2014 by
an updated version of the plane.
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