Voyager record attempt half way

Press, 19 December 1986, Page 4

Voyager record attempt half way

NZPA-AP Los Angeles The crew of the experimental aircraft Voyager neared the half-way point of its historic effort to fly around the world without refuelling, as ground personnel kept a close watch on its fuel consumption. Voyager officials said they were not too concerned about failing from a lack of fuel as the plane’s instruments had been giving false readings. Burt Rutan, designer of the plane and brother of the co-pilot, Dick Rutan, said yesterday the rest of the 40,000 km flight would be “nip and tuck" because of the amount of fuel used to dodge major storms in the Indian Ocean. Voyager passed over Sri Lanka more than 17,000 km into the trip, and was heading towards the southern tip of India, said a spokesman, Mr Larry Cansler. The craft left Edwards Air Force Base on Sunday. Mr Cansler said there was no longer much concern about whether Voyager would have enough fuel in its 17 tanks to complete the flight. Its front engine was stopped after running a day longer than planned to circumvent the storms. “Voyager is running efficiently on one engine at 3600 metres, and we expect fuel consumption to be much better on the second half of the flight,” he said, adding that an instrument aboard the plane that indicates hourly fuel consumption apparently was giving a slightly high false reading. The Voyager had two world records for longdistance flights within reach today: the 18,081.5 km staight-line record for a piston-driven plane set 20 years ago by a Lockheed P2V-1, and the 20,168.1 km standard for absolute straight-line distance held by an Air Force 852 jet bomber since 1962.