A solar-powered aircraft completed its epic round-the-world flight

On July 26, 2016, at five minutes past night on GMT, the Solar Impulse 2 solar-powered aircraft completed its grandiose trip around the world and finished in the same place from where it launched on March 9, 2015 - in Abu Dhabi.

Pilots from Switzerland, Andre Borschberg and Bertrand Piccard, overcame more than 40,000 kilometers on their amazing aircraft. If you summarize all the time they spent exclusively in the sky, you get about 505 hours, which is more than 23 days. For all 16 months of travel, the only fuel used to refuel the aircraft was solar energy.

The final section of the route was the flight of Solar Impulse 2 from Cairo to Abu Dhabi. Pilots covered this distance in almost two days.

The huge wing span of the Solar Impulse 2 aircraft can be compared with the Airbus A380, it is only slightly inferior to the world's largest passenger liner and reaches 72 meters. The mass of this stunning sunflower is 2,300 kilograms, but it is capable of reaching heights of up to 8,500 meters.

Solar batteries feed 4 electric motors, the total power of which is 70 horsepower. 17,000 batteries are located on the wings, as well as the fuselage of air transport. At night, the aircraft can travel in exactly the same way as during daylight hours - the operation of its engines is provided by lithium batteries that have accumulated enough solar energy during the day.