If they're doing this in stages I'm sort of surprised they're going east instead of "west with the night" or rather day. If you choose when you start a journey you can better maximize the ratio of day to night. Of course, the tradeoff is that both are longer which increases your need for batteries, so maybe that's more important. Especially cross the Pacific, I guess, where they had to travel for much longer.

They probably taking advantage of jet streams. They flows West to East.

Aren't winds way better going east (direction of jet streams).

The jetstream flows east, I imagine they might be trying to make use of that, or at least not have to fight it.

Mildly interestingly, the pilot's name is Bertrand Piccard.

What's interesting about the name exactly?

The person himself is (unsurprisingly) from _the_ Piccard family.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Luc_Picard ?

Yep, named after Auguste Piccard (and his brother Jean), grandfather of Bertrand and father of the mariana trench explorer Jacques. Pretty crazy family that is.

So if you thought the name of the pilot is interesting, it's in fact the other way round - the name is interesting because of this family.