RABAT: A solar-powered plane early Friday completed a flight over the Moroccan desert to showcase renewable energy, as a key summit in Rio discussed “greening” the world economy.

The Swiss-made Solar Impulse landed in Ouarzazate at 26 minutes after midnight (2326 GMT) after having taken off from Rabat at dawn on Thursday.

“Once again, the flight was magnificent,” Borschberg said shortly before landing.

Earlier, during the flight, pilot Andre Borschberg told AFP by satellite telephone from his cockpit said he was optimistic about the chances of success.

“The sky is magnificently beautiful and I am pretty confident of arriving at the destination,” pilot Andre Borschberg said.

“Mother Nature seems to be more favourable than the last time.” An earlier attempt to reach Ouarzazate last week was foiled by rough conditions but the giant sun-powered plane.

When Borschberg made his first attempt to cross the desert on June 13, he had to turn round because of strong winds and turbulence near the Atlas mountains.

This was the final stage of a trip that has taken him from his native Switzerland to Spain and then to Morocco.

It was the first-ever flight between two continents by an aircraft that does not require a single drop of fuel.

“Our journey shows that there are other ways of saving energy and of saving the environment and the planet,” Borschberg told AFP from the cockpit of his plane, which looks like a giant glider.

Friday's landing point, Ouarzazate, is where the Moroccan authorities plan to build the largest solar power station in the world.

Speaking of his foiled bid the previous week, Borschberg said people “should not talk of failure, but of experience. It's training; you learn a lot of things.”

The flight was described as the most challenging Solar Impulse has yet faced because of the arid, baking hot nature of the terrain and the proximity of the mountains, which are more than 3,000 metres (9,800 feet) high.

The giant high-tech aircraft, which has the wingspan of a jumbo jet but weighs no more than a medium-sized car, is fitted with 12,000 solar cells feeding four electric motors driving propellors.

The flight has been jointly organised by the Swiss Solar Impulse company and the Moroccan agency for solar energy (Masen).

Masen is responsible for building a power station with an initial capacity of 160 megawatts and plans to raise this capacity to about 500 MW to 2015.

Last month, the solar-powered plane made the 2,500-kilometre (1,550-mile) journey from Madrid to Rabat, its longest to date and its first between continents, after an inaugural flight to Paris and Brussels last year.

The flights are intended as a rehearsal for the goal of a round-the-world trip in 2014 by an updated version of the plane.