The five-month journey of a single-seat, solar-powered plane around the planet got off to a successful start this morning, when Solar Impulse 2 touched down in Oman after a 13-hour flight from Abu Dhabi.

“The flight went really well, everything went as planned,” says a team spokesperson. It’s an auspicious start, but a small step (about 270 miles) on the 20,000-mile journey that will take about 500 hours of flying time. Pilot André Borschberg flew the first leg, his partner Bertrand Piccard will take off next.

The 5,000-pound, zero-emission plane has a wingspan longer than that of the Boeing 747. Solar panels covering the aircraft’s wings and fuselage charge up four extra-efficient batteries, which power the 17.4-horsepower motors. That’s enough juice to move the plane at 20 to 90 mph, a speed closer to that of a professional cyclist than your typical gas-powered plane.

An airliner makes the flight from Abu Dhabi to Oman’s Muscat International Airport in just over an hour, Solar Impulse 2 did it in 13 hours, 1 minute (it was supposed to take about 12, but strong winds on the ground put the plane in a holding pattern for a while). It reached a maximum altitude of 19,000 feet, short of its ceiling, but plenty for this short journey. When it’s time for longer flights (like the coming five-day jaunt across the Pacific), the plan is to cruise up to 28,000 feet during the day, then descend to about 5,000 feet at night, converting altitude into distance until the sun comes back up to recharge the batteries.

Lots of sun to charge up the batteries on the flight to Oman. Solar Impulse

Stage two of the trip should kick off from Muscat at 7 am local time on Tuesday, with Ahmedabad, India for a destination. It should take about 20 hours to make the 910-mile flight. After that comes Varanasi, India, then Mandalay, Myanmar, and Chongquing and Nanjing in China before the Pacific crossing, with a stop in Hawaii en route to Phoenix. Solar Impulse 2 will stop somewhere in the Midwest (TBD based on weather conditions), then touch down at New York’s JFK airport. From there, it will cross the Atlantic, landing in either Southern Europe or North Africa, and then head back to Abu Dhabi.

The point of the flight isn’t to produce commercially viable solar-powered planes—the technology is far from being able to power commercial flight—but to prove what’s possible. “When the Apollo astronauts went to the moon, it wasn’t to launch tourism on the moon and open hotels and make money,” Piccard says. “It was to inspire the world.”