Around the World In 14 Days

An anonymous reader writes: "Adventurer Steve Fossett succeeded Tuesday on his sixth try to pilot a balloon solo around the world, crossing the meridian where he started his historic journey June 19, his ground crew at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, announced. Here is the official site, while there's also several other articles, including this one."

Comments

I'm glad he finally made it

[Anonymous Coward]

Now we don't have to hear about him trying and failing anymore!

That's not his first name!

[HMV]

"Adventurer Steve Fossett"? This must be the first report I've seen in years that didn't say "Multi-Millionaire Steve Fossett". I had become convinced that Steve was his middle name.

Re:Haha!

[fruey]

No, Branson gave up long ago. I met him when he took off from Marrakech, Morocco, in 1999. He was with Steve Fosset at that time and I was lucky to talk to Steve, who's a pretty genuine guy.

Branson never attempted the flight solo. He was pipped on the circumnavigation by some other team, and Fosset then went alone to become the first to do it solo.

Official rules as to what constitutes a flight which is a real circumnavigation are on the site, it has to be between the two 30 degree meridiens basically... in any case it will not be ratified until some weeks have passed.

not 24,000 miles

[crow]

The Earth is about 24,000 miles around, and he's about 8,000 miles short of that. Obviously, as you said, if he had gone on a 15-minute 1-mile trip around the South Pole, nobody would have considered it a round-the-world trip. At what point does it count?

Sure, he set a record for the longest distance solo flight, I'll give him that.

Re:not 24,000 miles

[Dead Chicken]

If you guys actually read some of the information on the site then you would see that

-snip-
As established by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale - the International governing body of aeronautics - the rules say a pilot must set a course of waypoints within a band of the Earth that stays at least 30 degrees latitude south of the North Pole or 30 degrees north of the South Pole. The lines joining those waypoints (on a "great circle" projection) must stay outside those polar caps, although parts of the actual flight can drift inside them.

One of the more quaint rules is...

[Thagg]

That you have to survive the landing for 48 hours, something that Fosset has thus far not demonstrated.

There was joke going around during the construction of Rutan's Voyager round-the-world-nonstop-nonrefueled plane, back in the mid 80's. Nothing was spared to reduce weight on that project, because every pound of additional structure required six or seven pounds of additional fuel, requiring more structure, and so on. Unfortunately, that philosophy turned the cockpit into a bit of a hellhole. The saying was, though, that any more than 48 hours of survival was excess design capacity; unneeded for the record attempt.

thad

Here are the "official rules"

[Lev13than]

It appears that the rules for balloon flights are established by The Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI):

http://www.fai.org/ballooning/rtw2-98.asp

There's lots of interesting info on their website at http://www.fai.org/

It's a good read, if for no other reason than gaining the ability to drop "homologation" into your next conversation.

What do you think that money was spent on?

[A nonymous Coward]

Ground crew. People who made the balloon, equipment, and supplies.

It's like the space program -- people act as if the money is just shot into space and lost. It wasn't -- it is spent on the designers, builders, support crew.

Whether or not those people should have considered getting "real" jobs is another question which you seem to know the answer to. I personally would rather they got it than some jacknape too lazy to get off his ass and look for a job. And if it comes down to a spacecraft or balloon engineer or ground crew, vs someone equally deserving in some other country, I'd just as soon it went to the locals.