For many years now, Swiss adventurer and balloonist André Borschberg has been working on an experimental solar-powered plane, which made its maiden flight in 2009.

Since a test showing that the Solar Impulse could stay aloft using solar power and solar-charged batteries, Borschberg has made test flight (Switzerland, 2010) after test flight (Madrid to Rabat, 2012), at ever-increasing distances.

Borschberg now has his sights set on the United States and is planning a cross-country, five-stage promo tour that will go from San Francisco to New York by way of Phoenix, Dallas, and Washington DC. The tour is set to begin on May 1—the plane will spend 10 days in each location to teach students and pilots about solar powered-flight.

While the $112 million plane is fully capable of crossing the United States nonstop (which would take three days, given its limited speed of 43 miles per hour—about one-tenth the speed of commercial airliners), it’s unable to due to “security reasons.”

"We would like to inspire students, schoolchildren, inspire as many people as possible to try to have the spirit to dare, to innovate, to invent,” Bertrand Piccard, Solar Impulse’s president and co-pilot said at a press conference in Mountain View, California on Friday.

"The question is not to use solar power for normal airlines," Piccard told reporters last year. "The question is more to demonstrate that we can achieve incredible goals, almost impossible goals, with new technologies, without fuel, just with solar energy, and raise awareness that if we can do it in the air, of course everybody can do it on the ground."

The group is planning a round-the-world flight for 2015.