Pilot embarks on first solar-powered intercontinental flight

A Swiss adventurer soared above sun-splashed Spanish valleys toward Morocco today on the world's first intercontinental flight in a solar-powered plane.

Bertrand Piccard, a 54-year-old psychiatrist and balloonist, took off into the night skies above Madrid in the Solar Impulse plane, a giant as big as an Airbus A340 but as light as an average family car.

After a graceful, nearly silent takeoff at 0900 IST, he guided the experimental plane southward from Madrid-Barajas airport and within eight hours was just northeast of the southern city of Seville.

An onboard video camera relayed images of the valleys stretched out below the aircraft, which has 12,000 solar cells in the wings turning four electrical motors.

"For one hour I had the full moon on my right and I had the sunrise on my left and that was absolutely gorgeous. I had all the colours of the rainbow in the sky and also on the ground," Piccard told AFP in an interview from the cockpit shortly after setting out."The question is not to use solar power for normal airplanes," he added.

"The question is more to demonstrate that we can achieve incredible goals, almost impossible goals, with new technologies, without fuel, just with solar energy, and raise awareness that if we can do it in the air of course everybody can do it on the ground."
Piccard gradually piloted the plane to an altitude of about 3,800 metres as he headed toward Spain's southern coast at some 50 kilometres per hour.

To qualify as an intercontinental flight he has only to cross the Strait of Gibraltar -- 14 kilometres at its narrowest point -- from Europe to Africa.

But the crossing is one of the most challenging points of the voyage because Piccard must first climb to 8,500 metres, where the temperature can dip as low as minus 29 degrees C and he will need an oxygen mask to breathe.