Solar-powered plane on round-the-world flight reaches California

BBC : On 23 April the experimental solar-powered aircraft Solar Impulse 2 landed at Moffett Airfield in Mountain View, California. It had just completed the ninth leg of its historic trip around the world, during which it took almost three days to fly from Kalaeloa, Hawaii, to the US West Coast. Although Solar Impulse 2 began its journey more than a year ago, taking off in March 2015 from Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, it was grounded for almost nine months in Hawaii because of a problem with its batteries, which had overheated during the record-setting flight across the Pacific Ocean. The plane’s two pilots, Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg, take turns flying the single-passenger craft. They hope to reach New York by early June to start preparing for the trans-Atlantic leg and their return to the starting point in Abu Dhabi.