{"id":27121,"date":"2016-06-23T04:47:17","date_gmt":"2016-06-23T11:47:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/06\/solar-impulse-2-completes-worlds-first-solar-powered-atlantic-flight"},"modified":"2017-06-04T19:55:07","modified_gmt":"2017-06-05T02:55:07","slug":"solar-impulse-2-completes-worlds-first-solar-powered-atlantic-flight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/06\/solar-impulse-2-completes-worlds-first-solar-powered-atlantic-flight","title":{"rendered":"Solar Impulse 2 completes world\u2019s first solar-powered Atlantic flight"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The flights take such a long time because Solar Impulse 2, as the name suggests, is completely powered by sunlight. The plane\u2019s massive 72-metre wings (broader than a 747!) are covered in some 269.5 square metres of photovoltaic cells. During the day, the cells power four 14kW (17.4hp) electric motors and top-up four 41kWh lithium-ion batteries. During the evening, the motors are driven by the batteries. Max cruise speed when the sun is up is 49 knots (90km\/h), and a rather languid 33 knots (60km\/h) at night.<\/p>\n

The solar cells don\u2019t quite refill the batteries during the day, which means the plane can\u2019t fly forever just yet. Max flight duration is somewhere around five to six days.<\/p>\n

For power-saving reasons, the Solar Impulse 2 cockpit can only carry a single human, and is both unheated and unpressurised. The pilots do sleep while they\u2019re up in the air, but usually just for 20 minutes at a time (the telemetry data for one flight showed 10 catnaps of 20 minutes over a 24-hour period). Now multiply those conditions by a continuous flight time of three or four days and you have some idea of the rigours that Piccard and Borschberg must go through.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The flights take such a long time because Solar Impulse 2, as the name suggests, is completely powered by sunlight. The plane\u2019s massive 72-metre wings (broader than a 747!) are covered in some 269.5 square metres of photovoltaic cells. During the day, the cells power four 14kW (17.4hp) electric motors and top-up four 41kWh lithium-ion [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":360,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1633,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27121","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-solar-power","category-sustainability"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27121","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/360"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27121"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27121\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":67117,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27121\/revisions\/67117"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}