MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Record bid flight takes off

Millionaire adventurer Steve Fossett took off in an experimental plane on Wednesday on an 80-hour flight that he hopes will set a nonstop distance record.

The GlobalFlyer aircraft, which has a wingspan as wide as an 11-story building is tall, lifted off around 7:20 a.m. (1220 GMT) after rolling ponderously down a rented runway used by NASA's space shuttles at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Fossett, 61, had initially planned to start the record-breaking attempt on Tuesday but had to delay by a day due to a fuel leak.

Fossett is out to break by 700 miles the 26,366-mile (42,431-km) nonstop distance record set in 1986 by Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager in a nine-day flight.

After taking off from Florida, he will 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.

Fossett needs to get GlobalFlyer, which is sponsored by Richard Branson's Virgin Atlantic Airways, up to an altitude of about 45,000 feet to take advantage of the naturally occurring high-speed jet stream flowing from the west to the east over the Northern Hemisphere.

In addition, temperatures at takeoff had to be 54 degrees Fahrenheit (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 tonnes when fully fueled.

Fossett, who last year successfully completed the first solo, nonstop circumnavigation of the globe, also holds various ballooning records.