Solar Impulse II completed a 56-hour leg from Hawaii to Mountain View, California just before midnight local time on Saturday. The aircraft, which had to undergo a refit in Hawaii after the epic leg from Japan wrecked its batteries, reportedly performed flawlessly on the trip, which ended with a dramatic entrance over the Golden Gate Bridge on the way to Mountain View just south of San Francisco. “WOW. A normal day as an explorer,” the organization tweeted as it sent out an iconic photo of the aircraft over the bridge shot from a chase aircraft with founder Bertrand Piccard at the controls.
“It’s a new era. It’s not science fiction. It’s today,” Piccard told CNN from California after landing. “It exists and clean technologies can do the impossible.” A big window of benign weather, rare for the North Pacific, helped the effort and the landing was under clear skies. The Mountain View landing was a diversion from the scheduled U.S. arrival point of Phoenix and it’s not clear what route the aircraft will take as it crosses the U.S. It has a major challenge ahead with a northern Atlantic crossing on its way to finishing the circumnavigation in Abu Dhabi.
