Solar Impulse to Continue its Round-The-World Mission in April 2016 Due to Damage to the Aircraft

The Solar Impulse team has today announced that irreversible damage to the batteries of the experimental aircraft will not allow pilots André Borschberg and Bertrand Piccard to complete the circumnavigation of the globe this year. The next flight is not planned before April 2016.

In the last leg of their adventure, Borschberg flew Solar Impulse from Japan to Hawaii and achieved the longest ever distance by a solar-powered aircraft: 117h 52min. Unfortunately, during the first ascend on day one of this flight, the batteries overheated and caused damage that the engineering team will take months to repair. The high climb rate and an over insulation of the gondolas caused the battery temperature to increase, and although the Mission monitored this problem during the flight, there wasn't any chance to cool the battery as Solar Impulse needed to take altitude every day to be able to fly through the night with the energy stored up during the day by the solar cells.

The Solar Impulse team explained that "The damage to the batteries is not a technical failure or a weakness in the technology but rather an evaluation error interms of the profile of the mission and the cooling design specifications of the batteries. The temperature of the batteries in a quicks ascend / descend in tropical climates was not properly anticipated."

The plane will stay in Hawaii during the maintenance and check flights which will start in 2016. In early April 2016, the mission will resume where it stopped with a flight from Hawaii to the USA West Coast, then across the USA, the Altantic Ocean, Europe and finally back to Abu Dhabi where Solar Impulse started its round-the-world flights in March of this year.

Piccard and Borschberg each released a statement following Solar Impulse's announcement.

World Records

A total of 10 World Records were claimed by Solar Impulse during this mission, two by Piccard (Muscat, Oman - Ahmedabad, India) and eight by Borschberg (Nanjing, China - Nagoya, Japan; Nagoya to Hawaii). FAI has ratified them all except for the most recent ones achieved during the last flight to Hawaii, which are still under review.

(Photo credit: Solar Impulse)