Closed Circuit Distance Flight and Retirement
Steve Fossett flew the GlobalFlyer to one more major aviation record: the Absolute Distance Over a Closed Circuit. A Closed Circuit record must take off and land at the same place and the distance is measured over verifiable waypoints. Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager had already flown the Voyager around the world in 1986, so a longer closed circuit course was needed to break their record. Fossett started in Salina, Kansas on March 14, 2006 and flew eastbound around the world. Upon leaving Japan he flew south and then tracked along the Equator in order to maximize the distance while crossing the Pacific Ocean. He landed in Salina, Kansas on March 17, 2006 after traversing a total of 25,294 miles (40,707 km) to set a new Absolute Distance Over a Closed Circuit Record.
With this final record flight before retirement, the GlobalFlyer had set three of the seven absolute world records of airplanes as ratified by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale. The GlobalFlyer is now on permanent display at the Smithsonian Institution National Air and Space Museum Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center.
Read more about this topic: Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer
Famous quotes containing the words closed, circuit, distance, flight and/or retirement:
“My old Father used to have a saying that “If you make a bad bargain, hug it the tighter”; and it occurs to me, that if the bargain you have just closed [marriage] can possibly be called a bad one, it is certainly the most pleasant one for applying that maxim to, which my fancy can, by any effort, picture.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“each new victim treads unfalteringly
The never altered circuit of his fate,
Bringing twelve peers as witness
Both to his starry rise and starry fall.”
—Robert Graves (1895–1985)
“The particular source of frustration of women observing their own self-study and measuring their worth as women by the distance they kept from men necessitated that a distance be kept, and so what vindicated them also poured fuel on the furnace of their rage. One delight presumed another dissatisfaction, but their hatefulness confessed to their own lack of power to please. They hated men because they needed husbands, and they loathed the men they chased away for going.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)
“No Raven’s wing can stretch the flight so far
As the torn bandrols of Napoleon’s war.
Choose then your climate, fix your best abode,
He’ll make you deserts and he’ll bring you blood.
How could you fear a dearth? have not mankind,
Tho slain by millions, millions left behind?
Has not conscription still the power to weild
Her annual faulchion o’er the human field?
A faithful harvester!”
—Joel Barlow (1754–1812)
“Douglas. Now remains a sweet reversion—
We may boldly spend, upon the hope
Of what is to come in.
A comfort of retirement lives in this.
Hotspur. A rendezvous, a home to fly unto.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)