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:
“A closed mouth catches no flies.”
—Miguel De Cervantes (1547–1616)
“The Father and His angelic hierarchy
That made the magnitude and glory there
Stood in the circuit of a needle’s eye.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“The rage for road building is beneficent for America, where vast distance is so main a consideration in our domestic politics and trade, inasmuch as the great political promise of the invention is to hold the Union staunch, whose days already seem numbered by the mere inconvenience of transporting representatives, judges and officers across such tedious distances of land and water.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Its shrill scream seems yet to linger in its throat, and the roar of the sea in its wings. There is the tyranny of Jove in its claws, and his wrath in the erectile feathers of the head and neck. It reminds me of the Argonautic expedition, and would inspire the dullest to take flight over Parnassus.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Adultery itself in its principle is many times nothing but a curious inquisition after, and envy of another man’s enclosed pleasures: and there have been many who refused fairer objects that they might ravish an enclosed woman from her retirement and single possessor.”
—Jeremy Taylor (1613–1667)