Solar Impulse 2, piloted by Swiss pilot Bertrand Piccard, prepares to land in Seville, Spain, on Thursday. Jean Revillard/AP

In case you missed it, this is awesome, and worth a quick read (thanks to NPR, USA):

‘Beautiful Flight’ Across The Atlantic Is Major Milestone For Solar Plane

After 71 hours and 8 minutes of flight time crossing the Atlantic, Solar Impulse 2 has touched down in Seville, Spain. It’s a major step toward the team’s goal of circumnavigating the globe using only the sun’s power.

The end of this leg means they’ve now completed 90 percent of that journey.

As The Two-Way has reported, the single-seater plane took off from New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport early Monday with pilot Bertrand Piccard at the controls.

It was a “beautiful flight that has countlessly left Bertrand in awe at the vast expanse of the Atlantic Ocean — encountering oil tankers, islands, whales, icebergs, and an abundance of water,” the team said in a blog post on the Solar Impulse site.

Piccard had to try to avoid clouds, or fly above them, so that the plane could use the sun’s power to charge its batteries. The plane also climbs to higher altitudes during the day, collecting potential energy, and then uses that stored energy to descend to lower altitudes as night falls. As the team explains, that’s “a time of approximately one hour when the solar generators do not need to be switched on.”

But flying responsibilities aside, Piccard still had a lot of time to fill as he traversed the Atlantic. At various points, he chatted live with business leaders and EU officials from the cockpit. He paged through a signed copy of Leonard Cohen’s “Book of Longing.”…

Read the whole article here.