The prototype of Solar Impulse, a pioneering Swiss bid to fly around the world on solar power, briefly took off for the first time on Thursday but under battery power, the organisers said. The high tech single-seater with the wingspan of an Airbus A340 airliner (63.40 metres) made a controlled 400 metre (yard) flight about one metre above the runway at Duebendorf air base near the Swiss city of Zurich, said co-founders Bertrand Piccard and Andre Borschberg.
"A plane like that has never flown before and it's extraordinary... because it's an area of flight that has been unexplored until now," Borschberg, chief executive of Solar Impulse, told AFP. "It was very important to see if it would rise and what way we could keep it stable," he added.