Team Rides Mountain Waves To Over 50,000 Feet
Aero-News learned Wednesday that -- after the briefest of
respites on terra firma, following his two record flights earlier
this year -- billionaire adventurer Steve Fossett has done it
again.
Wearing NASA spacesuits and flying along the crest of the Andes,
Fossett and co-pilot Einar Enevoldson took their Perlan high
performance research glider on the world's first stratrospheric
glider flight Tuesday -- surfing the Andean 'mountain wave' to a
height of 50,699 feet, breaking the previous record by 1,662 feet.
The old record of 49,009 feet by Robert Harris was set in 1986 in
California.
The Perlan team calls the flight a victory for careful weather
planning, precision flying, experience and teamwork. The actual
height achieved still must be verified by the
Fédération Aéronautique Internationale
(FAI).
After a tow to 13,000 ft on Tuesday, Fossett and Enevoldson
began their search for the lift required to achieve their goal.
Capitalizing on the 'mountain wave' phenomena of high altitude
updrafts and their own extensive gliding experience (Fossett has
set 10 absolute world glider records for speed and distance, while
former NASA research pilot Enevoldson has been flying gliders since
1949), the pair had only their pressure suits, helmets, foot
heaters and hand muffs to ward off the cold inside the
unpressurized tandem cockpit as outside temperatures fell to as low
as -57 degrees Celcius.
Some 4-1/2 hours into the flight, the 72 foot wingspan Perlan
glider -- an extensively modified version of a German-built DG-505
high-performance sport glider -- finally achieved the record
altitudes first targeted by the project at its conception seven
years ago, with first flights in New Zealand taking place in
2002.
"This record is special," said Fossett. "We have made attempts
in New Zealand, USA and Argentina over a period of five years -- so
this is a hard won success."
During the course of the flight, the pair found themselves
flying well above commercial air traffic -- a fact received with
bemusement by pilots of passenger jets under the same air traffic
control.
"I couldn’t understand the Chilean controller describing
us in Spanish to the airline pilot, but I understood the answer by
the pilot," laughed Fossett. "'Wow'."
The Perlan Project was initiated by Fossett -- who is well-known
for his around the world record flights by sailboat, balloon and
solo airplane -- and project operations director and chief engineer
Enevoldson, in conjunction with NASA's Dryden Flight Research
Center at Edwards Air Force Base, CA
The pair's objective was to prove the possibility to achieve
un-powered flight to tremendous altitude by literally 'surfing'
from one mountain wave to another -- to increasingly greater
height.
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