Limited time for Fossett flight

2006-02-08 09:49

Cape Canaveral - A fuel leak forced millionaire adventurer Steve Fossett to cancel plans to take off on Tuesday on what he hoped would be the longest ever nonstop flight.

Lift-off of the GlobalFlyer, an experimental airplane with a wingspan as wide as an 11-story building, had been scheduled for shortly after dawn from the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida.

But minutes before the planned lift-off, Fossett was still huddled with his team on the rented runway used by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (Nasa) space shuttles.

"Oh, I don't like the look on his face," said Virgin Atlantic chief Richard Branson, who sponsored the aircraft and who was watching Fossett on a television screen from a guest lounge near the runway. A few minutes later, Fossett called off the flight.

Conditions for take-off

At an informal press briefing on the runway, he said although the plane's leak could be fixed for another take-off attempt on Wednesday, conditions in the jet stream were not favourable until Thursday at the earliest.

Fossett needs to get GlobalFlyer up to an altitude of about 13 720m to take advantage of the naturally occurring high-speed jet stream, which flows from the west to the east over the northern hemisphere. In addition, temperatures for take-off must be 12.22 Celsius or cooler for GlobalFlyer's single engine to build enough thrust to ease the craft off the runway.

The plane weighs more than 11 tons when fully fuelled. Fossett's team has laid out a 41 841km voyage that spans the globe and then some. After taking off from Florida, he plans to fly over the Atlantic, cross Africa, Saudi Arabia, India, China, Japan, the Pacific Ocean, Mexico, and the United States and then back over the Atlantic before landing at Kent International Airport outside London.

'The ultimate flight'

The flight is expected to last 80 hours. Fossett has had problems with fuel leaks on GlobalFlyer before. During a successful attempt last year to make the first solo, nonstop circumnavigation of the globe, GlobalFlyer lost more than 1 360kg of fuel during its ascent.

Despite the problem, the plane, built by Scaled Composites of Mojave, California, landed with fuel to spare, spurring Fossett to wonder how much farther it could have flown. He hopes to find the answer upon conclusion of what he calls "the ultimate flight". Fossett said he must take off before the end of the month while temperatures in Florida are still cool, or postpone the flight until next year.

- Reuters