Tokyo: The solar-powered aircraft Solar Impulse 2 will not be able to take off from Nagoya airport in central Japan to travel around the world until mid-June as its wing needs to be repaired, the organisation behind the project said on Thursday.
Last Monday, Solar Impulse 2, en route to Hawaii, was forced to make a detour to Nagoya owing to bad weather.
Both the organisation and flight pilot André Borschberg said that one of the ailerons in the right wing was damaged by wind after landing in Nagoya and will be repaired in seven to 10 days as the parts needed to be brought from Switzerland, Efe news agency reported.
On Wednesday, the team installed an inflatable mobile hangar at the Japanese airport for the Solar Impulse 2 to carry out the required maintenance work.
The plane took off from the eastern Chinese city of Nanjing on Sunday after being forced to delay its departure for over a month, again due to bad weather conditions.
Solar Impulse 2 had aimed to complete the 8,000-km journey to the Hawaii islands in five days, which will be the seventh and the biggest leg of its journey around the world.
The trip across the Pacific is considered the most difficult stage of the flight due to unstable weather formations in the ocean and the enormous distance which surpasses the sum of the previous six stages. It was going to be a new record for the airplane.
Solar Impulse 2, that runs on more than 17,000 solar cells, faces the challenge of flying around the world in 12 stages that has included stopovers at Muscat (Oman), Ahmedabad, Varanasi (India), Mandalay (Myanmar), Chongqing and Nanjing (China) and has covered more than 6,000 km.
