Fédération Aéronautique Internationale world record · 18 August 2008
Scott Kasprowicz and Steve Sheik flew a factory standard AgustaWestland A109S Grand east out of New York and came back eleven days later, having taken almost six days off a record that had stood since 1996. It still stands.
Confirmed position, from the crew's own dispatches.
Imagery: Esri, Maxar, Earthstar Geographics · elevation: AWS Terrain Tiles, SRTM and GMTED ·
aircraft modeled to the dimensions the crew published for N1US.
Twelve positions are confirmed from the crew's own dispatches; the waypoints between them are
reconstruction, and are labeled as such as the replay passes each one.
"In spite of a marked fuel disadvantage the Grand Adventure team hopes to not only break the record but do so in such a manner as to make future attempts unlikely."
grandadventure08.com / aircraft, August 2008That is a falsifiable claim with a clock on it, and the clock has now run for eighteen years. The pages here set out what they flew, what it cost them, and what a challenger would actually have to do to take it back.
Day by day
Every dispatch the crew posted between 7 and 18 August, recovered from the archive, including the day they lost an entire twenty four hours in Okhotsk and still won by six days.
Read the eleven days →N1US
Serial number 40 off the Grand line, in a five passenger executive fit. No ferry tanks, no crew bunk, no modifications, and 47 percent less fuel than the machine it was chasing.
See the comparison →The open question
An average of 136.7 km/h is less than half the aircraft's cruise. This record was never about speed. Here is what it actually measures, and where the remaining margin has gone.
Read the analysis →Two in the air, four on the ground
Kasprowicz and Sheik flew it. A command center in Virginia moved fuel across the Bering Sea and argued with a credit card company about how one card could be in so many countries in a day.
Meet the team →