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.

FMI: www.perlanproject.com/Perlan/, www.stevefossett.com