![]() McCarthy in afflatus mode is magnificent, vatic, wasteful, hammy. Thirteen months later, the wreckage at last was pinpointed after a hiker discovered Fossett’s aviation license in a ziplock bag near Mammoth, California.īut on that heady night when Fossett returned to Salina, Branson offered the tribute that would define his friend: “He is the adventurer’s adventurer.There have always been two dominant styles in Cormac McCarthy’s prose-roughly, afflatus and deflatus, with not enough breathable oxygen between them. ![]() His disappearance launched a massively intensive and expensive search and instigated one of the first crowdsourced attempts to locate a missing person by scouring satellite images. He took off alone on a pleasure jaunt in a single-engine, two-seat plane about 90 miles southeast of Reno, Nevada. A wobbly Fossett climbed out of the cockpit, hugged his wife and shouted to the crowd: “This was a big one!” Branson dashed up with a bottle of champagne.įate finally caught up with Fossett, on September 3, 2007. Journalists from around the world had camped out to report on his return. At 1:37 on the afternoon of March 3, after being aloft for 67 hours, he landed. Cooperative tail winds pushed him back to Salina faster than he had anticipated. No sooner had Fossett taken off, however, than a series of potentially catastrophic problems surfaced-a temporary failure of the GPS navigation system, a fuel leak, a total loss of the backup oxygen supply essential to survive any steep emergency descent.ĭespite the risk, Fossett insisted on continuing. When I hit the last marker on the runway, I pulled back hard on the throttle and surged upward. ![]() The GlobalFlyer had never taken off carrying this much weight.” Fossett had been concerned, he recalled, “that the wings might dislodge on takeoff from the weight of the fuel. “I was just leveling off so that I could ascend faster. “I didn’t mean to scare anyone,” Fossett told me. ![]() I later asked him about the moment when it looked to everyone as if the plane was going down. It would maintain an altitude of about 45,000 feet for most of the flight.Īt the time, Fossett and I were collaborating on his memoir, Chasing the Wind. A split second later, the aircraft righted itself, catapulted into the dusk, headed east and disappeared. The plane roared overhead-only to dip sharply, as if it were going to crash. GlobalFlyer raced toward us down the runway, gaining speed, thundering like an avalanche as Fossett lifted off. A shuttle bus transported us to the end of the two-mile runway as Fossett prepared for takeoff. Fossett hugged his wife, Peggy, gave the rest of us a thumbs up, touched the Boy Scout emblem painted next to the cockpit as a good-luck gesture and crouched to enter. “I’ll be back in a couple of days,” Fossett predicted lightly. The crew called it the “flying gas tank.”įossett’s friend and the mission’s sponsor, Sir Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Galactic, was on hand, holding the hatch open for Fossett. Every inch of the 4,000-pound catamaran-shaped plane was filled with fuel-18,000 pounds in 13 tanks, 82 percent of the plane’s weight. In the GlobalFlyer, designed for maximum fuel storage and minimum weight, Fossett hoped to make the first solo circumnavigation of the globe without stopping or refueling. (Today the plane resides in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum Udvar-Hazy Center.) Painted a vivid red, white and blue, the Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer resembled a giant praying mantis, the wings spanning 114 feet, the head a huge jet engine, the body a claustrophobic 3- by 7-foot cockpit. I stood on the tarmac as the world-record-breaking adventurer Steve Fossett prepared to take off in the single-occupant plane he had commissioned. On February 28, 2005, temperatures hovered just above freezing on a late afternoon in Salina, Kansas.
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