Plane powered by sun returns home

The Swiss sun-powered plane Solar Impulse landed back home in Switzerland on Tuesday after complet­ing the final leg of its historic trans­continental flight.

This was an extraordinary adventure...

The high-tech aircraft was greeted by an enthusiastic crowd of supporters at Payerne airport in western Switzerland, two months after it took off from there on May 24 on a journey that took it from Europe to North Africa and back.

“This was an extra­ordinary adventure, not only because of what was achieved with this plane... but also because of the solid team,” said Andre Borsch­berg, one of the co-founders of the project.

Earlier, pilot Bertrand Piccard took the plane up into a cloudless sky from an airfield near Toulouse, southern France, where it had waited for a week for the right weather conditions to complete a journey to Spain, Morocco and back again to Swit­zerland.

The high-tech aircraft, which has the wingspan of a large airliner but weighs no more than a saloon car, is fitted with 12,000 solar cells feeding four electric engines.

With the final stage completed, the 6,000-kilometre journey became the longest to date for the aircraft after an inaugural flight to Paris and Brussels last year.

The trip was intended as a rehearsal for a round-the-world flight planned for 2014 in an updated version of the plane.