More than a year after the odyssey began, the Swiss-led Solar Impulse project is ready to resume its round-the-world, solar-powered airplane flight in Hawaii on Thursday.

Takeoff is set for 3 p.m. GMT (8 a.m. PT, 5 a.m. Hawaii time), the team tweeted.

The ultra-lightweight Solar Impulse 2 airplane started out on its trek from Abu Dhabi in March 2015, made stopovers in Oman, India, Myanmar, China and Japan, and got as far as Hawaii last July.

The five-day, five-night nonstop flight across the Pacific to Hawaii took a heavy toll on the plane’s batteries, however. The system overheated, and it took several months to make the repairs. The team also had to wait for reliably good weather to return.

This week, the leaders of the $ 150 million effort said it was finally time to fly.

“We knew this day would come where we can finally say: Tomorrow we will be taking off,” Solar Impulse chairman and pilot Bertrand Piccard said Wednesday on his website.

Piccard is set to fly the single-seat airplane from Kalaeloa Airport to Moffett Airfield in Mountain View, Calif., over the course of 62 hours. That’ll be the first leg of a renewed campaign due to cross North America and the Atlantic, then heading through Europe and finally back to Abu Dhabi.

The point of the 22,000-mile flight is to demonstrate environmentally friendly technologies. Solar Impulse 2 is an upgraded version of the solar-powered plane that made a two-month-long journey across America in 2013.

More than 17,000 solar cells cover the plane’s wings, fuselage and tail, feeding 1,400 pounds of lithium polymer batteries. Four 17-horsepower electric motors, each packing the power of a small motorbike, push the plane through the air. The system is designed to fly through the night, relying on stored energy.

Thanks to advanced carbon composites and insulation, Solar Impulse 2 has a wingspan wider than a Boeing 747 jet (236 feet) but weighs only about as much as a family car (5,100 pounds).

The downside is that its travel speed is also in the family-car range: a maximum of about 87 mph, and an average of 40 mph or so. That’s why it’ll take two and a half days of nonstop flying to make the 2,400-mile trip to Moffett Airfield. During that time, Piccard will have to pilot the plane, eat, drink, sleep and do whatever else needs to be done in a seat that can convert into a couch as well as a toilet.

Piccard and Solar Impulse’s CEO, Andre Borschberg, will take turns in the cockpit for what’s expected to be at least five marathon flights. In between, there’ll be stopovers to recharge the batteries – and recharge the flight team as well.

You can follow the flight via Solar Impulse’s website, YouTube channel and Twitter account (@solarimpulse).

GeekWire

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