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 and/or retirement:
“Because you live, O Christ,
the spirit bird of hope is freed for flying,
our cages of despair no longer keep us closed and life-denying.
The stone has rolled away and death cannot imprison!
O sing this Easter Day, for Jesus Christ has risen!”
—Shirley Erena Murray (20th century)
“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)
“Though there were numerous vessels at this great distance in the horizon on every side, yet the vast spaces between them, like the spaces between the stars,—far as they were distant from us, so were they from one another,—nay, some were twice as far from each other as from us,—impressed us with a sense of the immensity of the ocean, the “unfruitful ocean,” as it has been called, and we could see what proportion man and his works bear to the globe.”
—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)