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In this April 23 photo, Solar Impulse 2 lands at Moffett Field in Mountain View, Calif., completing the leg of its journey from Hawaii in its attempt to circumnavigate the globe.
DAYTON, Ohio » A solar-powered airplane’s planned flight from Ohio to Pennsylvania has been postponed.
The Swiss-made Solar Impulse 2 is on an around-the-world journey. It was scheduled to fly from Dayton to the Lehigh Valley Tuesday morning, but project officials scrapped those plans late tonight.
Officials say that during a failure of the cabinet of the Solar Impulse’s mobile hangar, the plane was briefly touched by the hangar’s fabric. The cabinet distributes the fan power needed to keep the mobile hangar inflated.
Officials say the plane does not appear to have sustained any damage, but they plan to examine it more closely over the next few days.
The globe-circling voyage began in March from Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, and made stops in Oman, Myanmar, China and Japan.
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This wasn’t like the plane was brushed by a falling Kleenex. “Briefly touched” means the fabric collapsed on top of the plane.
It’s a sturdy craft and the hangar fabric is as light as they could reasonably make it, but that’s a load the wing wasn’t meant to sustain (compression rather than the extension caused by “holding up” the fuselage during flight). So they do have to check it out for damage.