Airplane To Make Global 'Green Flight'

This past Sunday, an airplane built by Pipistrel, a Slovenian company, left Ljubljana, to fly some 62,000 miles, circumnavigating the globe in about 2 months. The project is a collaborative effort with Penn State University
The plane is called a Virus-SW914. It’s light, weighing in at only 640 pounds with a maximum take-off weight of about 1,500 pounds. An ultralight in the United States weighs about 250 pounds, and in Europe the Virus would fall into that class.
To cut weight and increase fuel capacity, the plane has extra tanks put into the wings, as well as an all-electronic instrument suite. Dropping the weight will let the plane get as high as 30,000 feet. Cruising at about 170 miles per hour, a typical Virus engine gets about 36 miles per gallon, but the modified version will far outstrip that and go somewhat faster, at about 180 mph.

The pilot, Matevz Lenarcic, plans to fly to Morocco, then to Senegal, and then across the Atlantic. After that he’ll take the plane up and down the coasts of South America, overfly the Antarctic and make his way across the Pacific to New Zealand, Australia, southeast Asia and back to Africa.

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