Tokyo: A solar powered aircraft flying between Japan and Hawaii as part of a round-the-world bid passed the halfway point of the perilous Pacific Ocean crossing Wednesday, and broke its own endurance record.
Solar Impulse 2 had travelled 55 percent of the way to the tropical US state by 0700 GMT, having flown 4,305 kilometres (2,675 miles) with 3,430 kilometres more to go, according to the project.
By that time the plane and its veteran Swiss pilot Andre Borschberg had logged 61 hours of continuous flight easily bettering the previous record of 44 hours they had set between China and Japan.
“Already halfway through what is probably the flight of my life! Loving it” Borschberg tweeted earlier from the cockpit. On the third day into the eighth leg of the global circumnavigation, expected to take five days and five nights and billed as the most difficult part of the adventure, the plane crossed a potentially problematic cold front, the project said.
That front which stretches across the Pacific is one of the factors that had kept the team stranded in Japan for almost the entire month of June. “Si2 crossed the 1st cold front, major hurdle overcome,” the team tweeted.
The experimental solar powered aircraft left Japan around 1800 GMT Sunday the early hours of Monday local time after spending a month in the central city of Nagoya. The propeller-driven plane was originally scheduled to fly directly from Nanjing in China to Hawaii, but bad weather along the way forced a diversion to Japan that stretched to a month.
Borschberg is alone and entirely self-reliant in the 3.8 cubic metre (134 cubic foot) unpressurised cockpit. Travelling at altitudes of more than 9,000 metres (29,500 feet), he has to use oxygen tanks to breathe and experiences huge swings in temperature throughout the day.
