Solar-powered plane makes intercontinental flight

Swiss pilot and adventurer Bertrand Piccard has flown his way into the record books again after completing the world’s first intercontinental flight in a giant solar-powered plane.A solar-powered aircraft has arrived at Morocco from Spain in the first intercontinental flight by such a plane.
Pilot Bertrand Piccard, a noted Swiss adventurer, landed the plane in the Moroccan capital of Rabat on Tuesday night after a 19-hour flight across the Strait of Gibraltar.The aircraft, developed by a private research group in Switzerland, carries 12,000 solar cells on its wings, which feed electricity to the motor that drives the propellers. Its wingspan is 63-meters — about the same as a large passenger plane.
Piccard, a 54-year-old balloonist, landed in the Moroccan capital Rabat under a full moon late Tuesday after completing the 19-hour voyage from Madrid on his experimental carbon-fibre aircraft.
Dozens of people, including his wife Michele as well as flight organisers and Moroccan officials, gathered on the runway in Rabat to witness the touchdown of the Solar Impulse after it crossed the Strait of Gibraltar.
Piccard, who made the first non-stop around-the-world balloon flight 13 years ago, thrust his fists into the air as he emerged from the Solar Impulse, an aircraft as big as an Airbus A340 but as light as an average family car.
“Solar Impulse has demonstrated that a solar-powered airplane can fly day and night using no fuel. The next challenge is to fly around the world,” the organisers said on their website solarimpulse.com.