Bertrand Piccard, a psychiatrist and balloonist, will next
"It gives the sensation of being in a science fiction story because you look at the sun and you understand that it's your only source of power," the explorer and father of three told AFP in New York.
"You see left and right, your four props turning with electrical motors, with no noise and it's a vision of future," he added in an interview at John F. Kennedy International Airport.
Piccard, and Swiss entrepreneur and engineer Andre Borschberg, are two thirds of the way through circumnavigating the Earth in a bid to inspire a future powered by renewable energy technologies.
Their single-seater plane, which they take it in turns to fly, weighs the same as a car but has the wingspan of a Boeing 747.
They take off at night with a fully-charged battery and climb to 28,000 feet (9,000 meters) in the day before descending to 5,000-6,000 feet, then catching the next sunrise, going up and down in waves.
The journey began on March 9, 2015 from Abu Dhabi, flying across Asia, the Pacific and the United States. They must now cross the Atlantic, fly through Europe and return to the Middle East.
Each pilot lives off special soups and meals designed to withstand extreme temperature changes and catnaps for 20 minutes at a time on a seat that extends into a business-class style flat bed.
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2016-06-solar-sci-fi-reality.html#jCp
