Solar Impulse, a solar powered electric driven aircraft, is on its way to Oahu Hawaii from Nanjing China. This is its 7th leg of an around-the-world flight and the longest leg. Over 5000 kilometers and 5 days of flight time.
During the day, its 17,000 wing-mounted solar cells must charge up the lithium batteries to continue operation of the aircrafts electric engines over night until sunrise.
The flight passes just east of Japan and then over the Pacific, just south of Midway island, all the way to the island of Oahu in the Hawaii chain.
A cold front developed that was too dangerous to cross, and the flight team decided to make a stop in Japan to await the next weather window to attempt the rest of the run to Hawaii.
Turns out that Japan was quite pleased to get a visit from this modern technology aircraft anyway.
You can follow tweets from the Solar Impulse team at
@SolarImpulse at twitter, and I also re-tweet posts associated with the project @kpmitton
Solar Impulse also has a Google+ site:
+SOLAR IMPULSE
Leg 7 is trackable on a map view on the team's website, press here: SolarImpulse.com
(http://www.solarimpulse.com/leg-7-from-Nanjing-to-Nagoya)
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