Two US adventurers began their attempt to re-enact the first nonstop flight across the Atlantic, flying from Newfoundland, Canada to Ireland.
After three weeks of weather delays and technical glitches, millionaire adventurer Steve Fossett and co-pilot Mark Rebholz left St. John's for Clifden, Ireland, on Saturday under cloudy skies and in high wind at 7:20pm Newfoundland time Saturday, said Dean Williams, a spokesman for the pilots.
Eighty-six years ago, British pilot John Alcock and US pilot Arthur Whitten-Brown took off from a makeshift runway in Newfoundland in a bid to make the first nonstop flight across the Atlantic. They ended up nose-down in an Irish bog, but nonetheless made history in 1919. The journey took 16 hours and 22 minutes.
delayed take-off
Fossett and Rebholz are trying to re-enact the 3,040km flight in a replica of the Vickers Vimy biplane. They hoped to take off June 14 -- the anniversary of the original flight -- but were grounded in St. John's for more than a week waiting for good flying weather. A planned departure for June 25 was also canceled because of equipment malfunction.
Although the predicted showers held off Saturday evening, the strong winds made for a rough launch.
"You could see that the wings were moving in the wind from takeoff," Williams said.
Since much of the up to 22-hour flight will be at night, they needed good weather over the Atlantic Ocean and in Ireland. Such ideal conditions along the entire route only occur about once a week.
Fossett, 60, and Rebholz, 52, spent the hours before the launch looking over the plane and testing its engine, Williams said.
After a farewell news conference just before takeoff, the pilots donned survival suits designed to keep them warm and settled in the plane.
"They were very concentrated, very excited obviously and quite happy to finally be taking off," Williams said.
record-holder
In March, Fossett became the first person to fly around the world solo without stopping or refueling. He also holds the record for the first solo balloon flight around the world.
The aircraft they will pilot is as close a replica as possible to the Vickers Vimy flown by Alcock and Whitten-Brown, but it has a taller wheel, modern engines and brakes and radios. But Rebholz is relying on the same, now-archaic, equipment that Brown used for navigation -- a sextant and magnetic compass.
With its 21m double wing span, insect-like body and the loud buzz of its engines that propel the plane at about 120km per hour, the biplane looks more like a giant dragonfly than an aircraft. The pilots' heads stick out of the open cockpit.
1913 challenge
The flight they will try to re-create was born out of a challenge issued in 1913 by the owner of the London Daily Mail. The offer was ?10,000 to the first pilots who fly from North America to the UK in under 72 hours.
For six years the challenge went unanswered.
Then in 1919 four teams, including Alcock and Brown, attempted to make their way to Newfoundland, the closest point in North America to the United Kingdom.
In the weeks before Alcock and Brown took to the air from Lester's Field, just outside St. John's, two of the teams crashed while the other didn't make it off the ground.
Fossett and Rebholz hope to land on the eighth hole on Clifden's Connemara Golf Links.
DOUBLE-MURDER CASE: The officer told the dispatcher he would check the locations of the callers, but instead headed to a pizzeria, remaining there for about an hour A New Jersey officer has been charged with misconduct after prosecutors said he did not quickly respond to and properly investigate reports of a shooting that turned out to be a double murder, instead allegedly stopping at an ATM and pizzeria. Franklin Township Police Sergeant Kevin Bollaro was the on-duty officer on the evening of Aug. 1, when police received 911 calls reporting gunshots and screaming in Pittstown, about 96km from Manhattan in central New Jersey, Hunterdon County Prosecutor Renee Robeson’s office said. However, rather than responding immediately, prosecutors said GPS data and surveillance video showed Bollaro drove about 3km
Tens of thousands of people on Saturday took to the streets of Spain’s eastern city of Valencia to mark the first anniversary of floods that killed 229 people and to denounce the handling of the disaster. Demonstrators, many carrying photos of the victims, called on regional government head Carlos Mazon to resign over what they said was the slow response to one of Europe’s deadliest natural disasters in decades. “People are still really angry,” said Rosa Cerros, a 42-year-old government worker who took part with her husband and two young daughters. “Why weren’t people evacuated? Its incomprehensible,” she said. Mazon’s
‘MOTHER’ OF THAILAND: In her glamorous heyday in the 1960s, former Thai queen Sirikit mingled with US presidents and superstars such as Elvis Presley The year-long funeral ceremony of former Thai queen Sirikit started yesterday, with grieving royalists set to salute the procession bringing her body to lie in state at Bangkok’s Grand Palace. Members of the royal family are venerated in Thailand, treated by many as semi-divine figures, and lavished with glowing media coverage and gold-adorned portraits hanging in public spaces and private homes nationwide. Sirikit, the mother of Thai King Vajiralongkorn and widow of the nation’s longest-reigning monarch, died late on Friday at the age of 93. Black-and-white tributes to the royal matriarch are being beamed onto towering digital advertizing billboards, on
With much pomp and circumstance, Cairo is today to inaugurate the long-awaited Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), widely presented as the crowning jewel on authorities’ efforts to overhaul the country’s vital tourism industry. With a panoramic view of the Giza pyramids plateau, the museum houses thousands of artifacts spanning more than 5,000 years of Egyptian antiquity at a whopping cost of more than US$1 billion. More than two decades in the making, the ultra-modern museum anticipates 5 million visitors annually, with never-before-seen relics on display. In the run-up to the grand opening, Egyptian media and official statements have hailed the “historic moment,” describing the
RSS