Solar Impulse plane lands in Japan due to bad weather

The first around-the-world flight in a solar-powered plane was forced to make an unscheduled stop in Nagoya, Japan, due to bad weather.

Swiss pilot André Borschberg took off from Nanjing, China, on Sunday on what was to be the longest leg of the 22,000-mile-journey, a five-day, 5,079-mile flight to Hawaii, according to the Associated Press.

Instead, the Solar Impulse 2 landed in Nagoya in central Japan, according to the plane's Twitter feed.

"Unfortunately the current weather window to reach Hawaii has closed," the Solar Impulse website said. "The cold front is too dangerous to cross, so we have decided to land in Nagoya Airfield, also known as Komaki Airport, and wait for better weather conditions in order to continue."

Despite the much-shortened flight, the China-to-Japan flight was still the world's longest solar flight in both distance (1,772 miles) and duration (44 hours), according to the Solar Impulse website.

"Of course we are a bit disappointed not to have made the flight nonstop to Hawaii, but elated that our solar airplane made such a great demonstration of the potential of clean technologies by flying two days and two nights without fuel!" said Bertrand Piccard, Solar Impulse initiator, chairman and pilot.

Elke Neumann, a spokeswoman for the Solar Impulse project in Nanjing, told the Associated Press that the teams had first noticed the bad weather pattern about a day and a half ago.

"We thought we might go through it," she said. "But between Japan and Hawaii there's no place to stop ... so we said, for us, the pilot's safety and the plane's safety are really a priority right now. So we said, let's wait the weather out a bit in Japan."

The around-the-world journey started in March in Abu Dhabi, and the plane has made stops in Oman, India, Myanmar and China.

The flight from Nanjing to Hawaii is the seventh of the 12 flights and is the riskiest.