Feature: Hawaiians anticipate historical landing of Solar Impulse 2

It should be less than 10 hours before the Solar Impulse 2 (SI2), the first solar-powered aircraft flying around the world, lands at Hawaii. Many local residents are anticipating the moment.

Jose Andersen, 38, said he started to track the latest news of the solo flight since Monday when it left Japan for Honolulu.

"The success of SI2 will give people more confidence, let them know that renewable energy, such as solar energy, is reliable," said Andersen, who decided to buy a new energy car to reduce his family's dependence on fossil fuel.

The SI2, powered only by the Sun's energy, is expected to land at Honolulu at dawn Friday local time.

Hawaii is the eighth leg of the SI2's current global flight, and the trip from Japan to Hawaii will break a world record of more than 110 hours of non-stop fight.

Jorge Landinez, who moved to Honolulu five years ago from California's desert resort of Palm Spring, said he expected someday passenger planes can be solar-powered too.

"The SI2 is a lighthouse to make people see the potential of solar energy," said Landinez, who built a wind power generator to provide electricity for his house and sell extra to a local electricity company. He has been driving an e-car since 2011.

The plane set off on its 35,000-km journey around the world from Abu Dhabi on March 9. It is piloted alternatively by Swiss explorers Andre Borschberg and Bertrand Piccard.

Flying day and night without any fuel, Borschberg is currently navigating alone in an unheated and unpressurized cockpit, sleeping in bursts of 20 minutes while on autopilot. He set the record for the longest solo flight during this trip, which is about 8,200 km and is the longest leg of its round-the-world journey.

"Can you imagine that a solar-powered airplane without fuel can now fly longer than a jet plane," Piccard was quoted by media, "This is a clear message that clean technologies can achieve impossible goals."

The plane weighs about as much as a family sedan and has 17,000 solar cells across its wingspan.

The trip is expected to take some 25 flight days, broken up into 12 legs at speeds between 50 and 100 km per hour. On the way to Hawaii, its average speed was around 75 km per hour.

SI2 initially left Nanjing, capital of eastern China's Jiangsu Province, on May 31 for Hawaii, but was forced to cut short its bid a day later due to what Borschberg termed "a wall of clouds" over the Pacific. It landed in the central Japanese city of Nagoya.

The next leg of the flight will be Phoenix, Arizona before Borschberg and Piccard fly together across the Atlantic on a return path to Abu Dhabi.

It took 12 years to build this solar plane and the first version in 2009 broke records for heights and distances travelled by a manned solar plane. Endi