As of this morning, the forecast calls for sunny weather all along the experimental aircraft’s route.
Pilot/adventurer André Borschberg currently plans to take off from Paris-le Bourget airport at about 07:00, climb to a cruising altitude of 3,500 meters, and then will fly east towards Troyes, continuing to Pontarlier, and then landing at Payerne airfield in Switzerland sometime after 19:00.
The entire flight is expected to take about 12 hours, and can be tracked lived at the project team’s website (see link below) and via the Smartphone app “Solar Impulse Inventing the Future”, available free on Appstore and Androïd Market.
The airplane’s position, altitude and speed will be shown live and cameras fitted inside the cockpit and at “Mission Control Centre”, the mission’s nerve centre, will allow people on the ground to “experience the adventure live,” according to a written statement from the team.
The single-seat, prototype aircraft has 10,000 solar cells which cover its 63 metres (207 ft) wingspan and generates about 40 horsepower, about the same power as a small scooter.
Swiss adventurer Bertrand Piccard and his partner, pilot Andre Borschberg, have been working on the Solar Impulse project since 2003.
"We know Solar Impulse is flying, we know it can go to through the night with no fuel, we know it is an incredible airplane but each time it flies, it is a different situation, it is a different emotion," Bertrand Piccard said.
The prototype plane is already in the record books for being the first entirely solar-powered plane to fly for 24 hours, although it needs near perfect, windless conditions to fly.
The precarious nature of flight conditions was illustrated in June, when the team made an unsuccessful attempt to reach the air show on 11 June, and then finally made it through a narrow weather window between two rain fronts on 14 June.
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