After a nine-month delay on a Hawaiian island, the Swiss solar-powered aircraft Solar Impulse 2 will attempt to resume its round-the-world odyssey Thursday, the plane's pilots said, according to dpa. Pilot Bertrand Piccard plans to take off at 1500 GMT from Kalaeloa Airport on Oahu for the 62-hour flight across the Pacific Ocean to Mountain View, California, on the US West Coast. The fuel-free flight to promote clean-energy technology continues a route that began in 2015 in Abu Dhabi and took the experimental aircraft to India, Myanmar, China and Japan on the first half of its global circumnavigation. From Mountain View, the journey is planned to continue across the United States, then over the Atlantic to Europe and back to Abu Dhabi. Solar Impulse 2 set a record for the longest solar-powered flight on the last leg of its journey, flying nearly 8,300 kilometers non-stop in July from Nagoya, Japan, to Hawaii. Battery problems that arose during the five-day flight had left the experimental aircraft stranded since then.
