You make good points, but let me ask you this.
Would you put the airmanship that Fossett needed on the same level as Charles Lindbergh's transatlantic flight?
That's my point.
That's not to discount his other achievements like going around the world in a balloon. That is a test, because you put yourself at the mercy of nature or running the Iditarod.
As far as the motor quiting issue goes, look again this guy didn't build this thing in his garage. In fact I doubt he did much more than supervise his engineers. You want to impress me build the plane and then fly this trip on its maiden voyage, but instead he had a team of engineers and test pilots do the work for him. I can't speak from fact on that, but I'm willing to bet he didn't screw in one screw. As yes I think that they had rescue aircraft standing by near his route if he had to ditch. I'd bet a months pay that he'd have been plucked out of the water before his skivies got wet.
I mean this quote right here pretty much sums it up.
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But like the fictional Dorothy who needed help to get home, Fossett relied on his engineering wizards to help him return safely to Kansas.
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Yahoo News)
It doesn't say he had to rely on his wits and courage to make it. It says "engineering wizards".
And oh the horrors he had to endure...
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He also had to stave off boredom, saying there wasn't much to look at in the air.
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Again, it's not that it wasn't an achievement, but an achievement for what? Aviation technology? Perhaps, but I would like to hear from an engineeer about how much of the technology is applicable to new aircraft. Was it a test of human will? It took him 3 days, even if he stayed awake for 3 days (which I doubt he did) there are truckers driving through the mountains who haven't slept for 3 or 4 days and are hyped up on Red Bull and Nodoz, and if you ask me I'm much more impressed by those guys (who don't kill themselves or anyone else) than I was by Fossett. How about the airline pilots who fly themseleves and their passengers safely to and from their destinations day in and day out? Risking themseleves and hundreds of people daily, and sometimes in aircraft that are hardly as pristine as the Global Flyer, or the guy flying freight doing single pilot IFR flying organs for transplants in a single engine turboprop? Those guys impress me a HELL of a lot more than some multi-millionaire who sits in an aircraft engineered by MIT grads, loaded up with the latest avionics, some of which probably was specifically designed for this trip.
When you've got sensors up the wing-wang one your aircraft it's a good bet that you've got an auto pilot too. If a C172 has one then his aircraft did as well, and chances are it was monitored by his ground control. I mean they were the ones who told him about his fuel problem. Was it a test of airmanship? Maybe, but again I doubt that he was making course corrections with a memo pad and a slide rule.
So with all that aside what else is there? In my view it was simply someone who had the money to do something. Like someone else said, Fossett has figured out that if you do something like this every so often people don't forget about you.
Our society loves to hold up people with money who do things as amazing and super-human and more worthy than other people. I mean you can be the worst pro-football player out there and you still can draw a multi-million dollar salary. You can take a bunch of drugs that turn you into a mutant and smash a bunch of homeruns and people are awed. Babe Ruth was an impressive ball player, because he wasn't super human. He didn't have a gym full of trainers and doctors. Hell most of the time he was probably drunk out of his skull.
Look it comes down to this analogy. If you take a kid from the poorest neighborhood in town, put him in a good home, getting him into the best private schools, hire all the tutors he needs, and spare no expense in making him into a doctor. Chances are very good that he'll be a doctor. In fact no one doubted that he'd be a doctor, and it's just not all that impressive. Sure it's great that people swooped him up and gave him that opportunity, but what is impressive what inspires people is when that same kid becomes a doctor ON HIS OWN. No tutors, no private schools, the world against him, and nothing but his own ambition and vision to get him to his goal.
You could've replaced Fossett with a trained monkey and the flight still would've gone as planned (maybe a little better since the monkey wouldn't have weighed as much as Fossett did).
You want to know about real tests of human will, courage, and that people with money a lot of times are just that? Read "The Proving Ground" by G. Bruce Knecht about the Sydney to Hobart yacht race.
So I'm still not impressed. Hell I'm more impressed by that cat who survived a 10 mile trip on top of a car.
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thanks for the compliment but you missed the mark a little...at 62 I'm not a "kid"!
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My mama always told me not to look a gifted horse in the mouth.
Naunga
