Whats wrong with this picture?
Couldn’t Steve Fossett have just flown around the south pole with a radius of about a mile or two to win the prize?
I mean, are there any rules involved? It just seems he was awfully close to the pole to me…
Yes there are.
From here :
The southern route is shorter, but it is the reduced levels of antii-aircraft fire that make it the most attractive to baloonists.
Tris
“What have you done to that cat? It looks half dead!” ~ Mrs. Erwin Schrodinger ~
Theoretically yes, but he didn’t. According to CNN Headline News the trip covered a total of about 20000 miles. That’s 80% of a trip around at the equator.
And as others have pointed out, there are rules.
Complaining that Fossett didn’t go the full circumference is like complaining that he swam the English Channel, but walked the last 50 feet. 
BTW, Fossett did swim the EC.
Is it just me or is anyone else thinking WHO CARES? This balloon thing is such a non-story. Lindy’s flight was a milestone in bringing Europe and America closer together. This is important only to other egocentric tycoons who had hoped to be the first to accomplish the same feat.
For every field of human endeavor, there is going to be someone who just isn’t interested. So why should I care that YOU don’t?
It is kinda ironic though, that his earlier attempts failed, and now that he’s succeeded, he can’t stop! Last I head he was still looking for a suitable place to land…
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- Amen to that. Fosset is from St Louis (which I am near) and the newspapers and television news have had extensive coverage and updates of all the attempts. Like, it’s going to cure cancer or end violence in the mideast or something…B-F-D - DougC
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I love his next project, though. He wants to take a glider into the stratosphere.
And you know, he better find a place to land soon. If he keeps going, he’ll pass Australia and will either have to land on an itsy bitsy island or wait till he hit North or South America…
Nah, I don’t think he actually “circumnavigated” the globe. Yes, he may have followed the “rules”, but I say the rules are set up wrong. You want to “circumnavigate” the globe, I say you have to cross the equator at least once. Preferably twice so you end up close to where you started.
Or how about this - your journey has to be at least 25,000 miles (or whatever the exact circumference of the earth is at the equator), and must cross the equator twice - now there would be a real set of rules.
This achievement leaves me weeping with joy as I watch humankind take another great leap forward, shaking off the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God… Or not. All the pumped up news coverage brings out the sarcasm in me.
I agree that, even if the rules are lax enough to allow it, skirting around the bottom of the globe isn’t really what people have in mind when they think of an adventurer “circling the globe in a balloon.” I thought the whole thing was silly every other time people attempted it, and now that I see how Fosse did it, I’m even less impressed.
Even if he had boldly stuck right to the equator, I’d still see the stunt as entirely superfluous. It’s not like the world has been waiting with bated breath for some brave soul to take his balloon around the world and prove the viability of the global balloon trade routes. It just seems meaningless and self-indulgent, not the significant achievement that the media want to portray. Maybe for his next stunt he and his expert support team will build the world’s biggest ball of tin foil.
They should have displayed the route on a Mercator projection. Would have looked much more impressive.
Well, it couldn’t have been too easy… wasn’t this his sixth try?
In his previous tries, was he closer to the equator? I have a vague recollection about not getting overflight permission for Libya (or some other hostile state) and that’s what stopped a previous attempt. So maybe he tried it a few times the koser way, then took advantage of the rules because he kept failing.
The simplest way would be to require that two points on the route be exactly antipodal. This guarantees that the length is at least one circumference and crosses the equator twice, and also rules out some other things which would fit your rules but not really be a “circumnavigation”. For instance, I could start just above the equator, go straight south, loop around the pole, and come back north to my starting point, then wander about aimlessly near my starting point until I had finished my miles. Two equator crossings, all longitudes, and a full distance, but obviously not a circumnavigation.
>> They should have displayed the route on a Mercator projection
Here ya go:
http://www.cnn.com/interactive/us/0207/fossett.path/frameset.exclude.html
“And you know, he better find a place to land soon. If he keeps going, he’ll pass Australia and will either have to land on an itsy bitsy island or wait till he hit North or South America…”
dantheman - I take that comment as an insult; New Zealand is not an “itsy bitsy island”. It may be small in comparison to the US but it is only marginally smaller than England and about the same size as Japan - neither of these islands would be refered to as “isty bitsy”.
Well, it looks itsy bitsy from where I stand. Why don’t you move a bit closer so I can see you better? 
Nah! It actually makes his lame trip around the pole look glorious that way.
At least keep between the tropic of cancer and the tropic of capricorn!
I think for his next adventure he should fly solo, in a single engine plane, along the same route as Lindburg! I mean, what a feat! ( what? huh, no way! NO, say it aint so! last month? Uh…)
Never mind!