Steve Fossett (1944 – 2007) American Sailor, Aviator and Adventurer
For over a decade, Steve Fossett galvanized the sailing world with his record-setting exploits at sea, while also surviving many near-death situations while attempting to set records in the air. Now he has apparently died at the age of 63 during a short flight over Nevada. Ironically, he was searching for an alternative dry lake bed for an attempt on the world land speed record, which would have been his first speed venture on land.
Fossett made enough money in the financial services business to retire very comfortably at 40, and worked his way through more typical endurance sports, at which he was competent but slow. After ticking off the more accessible adventures on his list, he realized there were numerous opportunities in sailing and flying where a wealthy and careful amateur could actually set world records. He didn’t care to explain his passion for collecting records like some people collect stamps, but clearly, it satisfied an inner urge and gave his life meaning.
So he invented a second career as the world’s only professional multi-sport record breaker. That was too much of a mouthful for the mainstream media; reporters instead settled on the more newsworthy label of “millionaire adventurer”– although Lance Armstrong was never called a “millionaire cyclist” or Dennis Connor a “millionaire yachtsman.” Presumably, this was also intended to distinguish him from the thousands of low-budget adventurers whose lesser feats are not worth covering.
Or perhaps it was to show disapproval of someone who confused the celebrity watchers by spending large sums of money on trips that tested his endurance rather than surrounding himself with luxury. He earned his public reputation as a daredevil with his round-the-world non-stop flights in balloons and aircraft, but many sailors recognized him as a trailblazer on the oceans. From 1999 to 2004, he re-wrote the record book for long distance speed under sail in his 125′ catamaran, breaking every record from 24 hours to round-the-world by large margins.
Learning to Sail–on a 60′ Trimaran!
He learned how to sail on Lake Michigan when he was still in his twenties, but his first sailboat race wasn’t until July 1993, a few weeks after he bought the 60′ trimaran “Pierre Ier” from Florence Arthaud. He renamed it Lakota after his Chicago company, hired British sailor Brian Thompson to show him the ropes, and went through an accelerated training course before entering the two-handed race around Britain and Ireland race. That is a course guaranteed to deliver some cold, wet and miserable conditions! “It was a 2,000-mile race, and we won it. That was a unique experience!” he said, and he was well and truly hooked!
The Open 60 trimaran was already the fastest offshore boat ever built, but no one had thought of using it for record breaking, preferring the previous class of longer but much heavier catamarans. So Steve set his first world record in September 1993, sailing around Ireland in 44 hr, 42 min. By 1994, he was ready for his first solo test, the singlehanded Route du Rhum, the highly-competitive trans-Atlantic race from France to Martinique.
“I competed mainly against the great French single-handed sailors,” he said after he finished a highly-creditable fifth. “I didn’t win that race, but it surprised the professional sailors that I could even do that well.” He continued west to the Panama Canal and set about demolishing all the existing records on the Pacific.
He was already pursuing achievements in the air, particularly long-distance ballooning records, which were being attempted by many international teams. The first time he hit the headlines was in February 1995, when he lifted off in South Korea in a balloon and landed in Leader, Saskatchewan, becoming the first person to make a solo balloon flight across the Pacific Ocean.
In 1996, he set an amazing solo record from Yokohama to San Francisco in 20 days. It still stands. It was “no contest” in the 1998 solo Transpac race from San Francisco to Hawaii, which he finished in 7 days: 22 hours–a time that has never been seriously challenged. And in 1999, he easily broke the Newport– Bermuda, singlehanded record in 1 day 16 hours—another record that still stands! He returned to the Pacific to take a shot at the crewed Los Angeles-Hawaii record–a mark that catamaran pioneer Rudy Choy had spent a decade establishing. Lakota easily achieved the first crossing in less than a week.
When he sold the boat, in November 2000, he had broken ten world records and six race records. Sailing Dennis Conner’s 60′ Stars & Stripes America’s Cup catamaran, he was also the first ever to finish the Newport-to-Ensenada race before sundown. (I walked around the boat onshore in La Rochelle, France in 2013 and it still looks very modern and fast.)
The World’s Fastest Boat
In 1997, he commissioned the California design team of Morelli & Melvin to create the world’s first unlimited racing multihull, and the result was a 105′ carbon fiber catamaran, launched in New Zealand in 1998. It easily broke the 24-hour record with a 580 nautical mile run during early sea trials.
However, after nearly driving the bows under and pitchpoling off New England, Fossett realized the boat was seriously over-canvassed. Other owners might have cut 20 feet off the mast–he had the bows lengthened by 20 feet! The re-built 125 footer, sailing under the name of sponsor Sony PlayStation, was now the fastest sailing craft ever built, but was still not completely reliable.
After a series of mishaps during the early stages of the Race 2000, Fossett retired in the South Atlantic and spent the next year refining the boat’s systems while breaking every short-course record around Europe. The greatest achievement was undoubtedly the trans-Atlantic crossing of 4 days 17 hours in October 2001. This passage shattered the previous record by almost two days, including a 24-hour run of 667 miles, and was a true landmark in the evolution of sailing.
Like the four-minute mile that ushered in a new level of running, the first four-day Atlantic crossing pushed sailing to new limits. Fossett’s achievements that year won him the Rolex Yachtsman of the Year award from the U.S. Sailing Association. He said he was “not surprised, but very pleased. There have been so many great sailors who never got it who have congratulated me-like Mark Rudiger, who was navigator on a winning Whitbread boat, and a couple of others who missed it.”
The Sky’s the Limit
In 2002, on his sixth attempt, he became the first person to fly around the world alone nonstop in a balloon. He launched the 10-story high Spirit of Freedom from Northam, Western Australia, on June 19 and returned to Australia on July 3, 2002, landing in Queensland, where the capsule was dragged along the ground for 20 minutes until it could be detached. Total duration was 14 days 19 hours 50 minutes, covering 20,626.48 statute miles. Fossett’s top speed during the flight was 186 miles per hour over the Indian Ocean. The capsule is on display in the Smithsonian Institution next to Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis.
On February 5, 2003, Fossett set two U.S. transcontinental airplane records in the same day. He flew his Cessna Citation X jet from San Diego, California to Charleston, South Carolina in 2 hours, 56 minutes, 20 seconds, at an average speed of 727 mph to smash the transcontinental record for non-supersonic jets. (A strong tailwind in the jetstream allowed him to record a supersonic speed over the ground.) He returned to San Diego, then flew the same course as co-pilot for fellow adventurer Joe Ritchie in Ritchie’s turbo-prop Piaggio Avanti. Their time was 3 hours, 51 minutes, an average speed of 546 mph which broke the turbo-prop transcontinental record
In early 2004, he was back on the water with a crew of 12 to achieve his final sailing goal: the fastest circumnavigation of the world. The boat–now named Cheyenne–arrived back in the Channel in a time of 58 days, 9 hours despite having to replace sections of mast track and almost breaking the forestay. By then, the skipper’s name appeared next to 23 official world records and nine distance race records. “It’s about taking the latest technology and making the most of it,” he explained, “building and sailing the fastest sailboat, maximizing the potential of the fastest airplane, developing and testing the technology to fly a balloon around the world-and, of course, meeting the challenge of harnessing weather systems to make these records possible.”
Now he announced that he was permanently retiring from sailing to allow him to devote all his time to his flying career. He was quite dispassionate about the sport that many of us have devoted our lives to. I suppose that for him, it was really just a means to an end. “It was a very successful program, over quite a number of years; I broke most of the important world records,” he pointed out. “In a couple of cases, my records were broken, and I went back and re-broke them. But then, I finally decided, ‘I’m not going to make a career out of defending my records.’ After getting the biggest record, the around-the-world record, I considered my sailing career complete.”
His vehicle of choice was now a radical twin-boom single-engine jet airplane plane that coincidentally was described as “trimaran-like” by its designer Bert Rutan. In 2005, Fossett made the first solo nonstop and unrefueled circumnavigation of the world in 67 hours in the Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer. His average speed was 342 mph, almost double that of the earlier prop-driven non-stop plane piloted by Dick Rutan and Jeanna Yeager.
Also in 2005, Fossett and co-pilot Mark Rebholz re-created the first nonstop crossing of the Atlantic in 1919 by the British team of Alcock and Brown. Their flight from St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada to Clifden, Ireland in the open cockpit Vickers Vimy replica took 18 hours 25 minutes. (Since there was no airport in Clifden, Fossett and Rebholz landed on the 8th fairway of the Connemarra Golf Course.)
In 2006, he demonstrated his relentless determination by going around the world twice in the GlobalFlyer. The first time was to gain the record for total distance traveled and unrefueled from Florida around the world and across the Atlantic a second time to land in England for a total of 76 hours, 45 minutes–a distance of 26,389 statute miles. The next month, he went around again to take a more obscure record “Distance over a closed circuit without landing” (with takeoff and landing at the same airport in Salina, Kansas.) Then he donated the Global Flyer to the Smithsonian’s Udvar-Hazy National Air & Space Museum.
The majority of his 93 aviation world records were actually set in gliders. The most notable were the distance record of 2192.9 km in December 2004 and the 2006 flight with Einar Enevoldson to 50,727 feet above the Argentinian Andes that won the “Absolute Altitude” record. (The duo had made many previous attempts over a period of five years in New Zealand and California.)
Fossett’s Final Run
The land speed record he was intent on adding to his collection certainly fit the bill since it depended on building a strong team and the application of advanced technology, but it also needed miles of flat smooth salt bed and perfect weather that only nature could control. This mark is also notable as by far the most widely followed and popular speed contest in history, with its legendary figures and super streamliners streaking across the salt flats at unbelievable speeds.
His target was the supersonic record of 763 mph set in 1997 by British fighter pilot Andy Green driving the twin-turbojet powered Thrust SSC. The English team increased the record by more than 130 mph, but found that driving faster than the speed of sound led to some unpredictable effects. They observed that the hard ground behind the car was being pulverized into powder by the shock wave, and the “transonic buffetting” under the car caused a cracked bottom panel stringer and broke rivets.
Fossett’s dart-like jet-powered racer Sonic Arrow was 47 feet long and looked suspiciously like a single-seat jet fighter without its wings. Power is from a single, after-burning J-79 turbojet developing 45,000 lbs of thrust formerly fitted to a USAF F-4 Phantom fighter-bomber. The car was originally designed and built by five-time land speed record-holder Craig Breedlove a decade ago. After chassis modifications and aerodynamic development, Fossett’s project director and aerodynamicist Eric Ahlstrom hoped it would be capable of exceeding 800 mph.
Fossett initially considered making test runs at Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats and had already sought approval from the U.S. Bureau of Land Management to use a 15-mile-long dry lake bed in remote east-central Nevada, said Chris Worthington, a bureau spokesman. His Marathon Racing Inc. applied for a special recreation permit earlier this year in anticipation of making a run in Eureka County, about 225 miles east of Reno. The bureau had completed an environmental assessment and planned to seek public comment. Who knows what would have happened next? Perhaps Fossett could have driven his car through the sound barrier and returned to tell the tale, but the odds were piling up.
Flying in the Nevada Wilderness
Steve Fossett and his single-engine plane vanished into an uninhabited landscape of soaring peaks and sagebrush desert. This area is notorious for wind gusts that can whip up without warning from any direction, with sudden downdrafts that can cause a plane to drop like a stone. In 1999, three well-known glider pilots were killed in two separate accidents after taking off from the Minden airport. Donald D. Engen, director of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, died along with the former president of a gliding organization after their sailplane broke apart and fell 4,000 feet. And nationally ranked glider pilot Clem Bowman died when his glider plummeted 100 feet shortly after takeoff.
Over 150 planes are known to have gone down over the years, and in the first week, searchers had already spotted another eight unlisted wrecks. Even passengers on commercial airliners flying between Las Vegas and Reno must keep their seat belts fastened for a ride that is often bumpy. Mark Twain described the Washoe wind this way: “But, seriously, a Washoe wind is by no means a trifling matter. It blows flimsy houses down, lifts shingle roofs occasionally, rolls up tin ones like sheet music, now and then blows a stagecoach over and spills the passengers.”
Fossett was the millionaire who put his money where his mouth was, and I shall miss him.
A Sporting Life on the Edge
Specializing in soybean futures trading, Fossett made his first million by age 33 — I was on the floor of the exchanges myself for 15 years,” he explained. “Five years after I started that, I began hiring people to build the company. There was a period of time where I wasn’t doing anything except working for a living,” he remarked. “I became very frustrated with that. I finally made up my mind to start getting back into things. I resumed mountain climbing, and did some other things like running marathons and cross-country ski races-distance races, as you might expect-and car racing.”
He feels his first major sports project was swimming the English Channel, which he did in September 1985, from France to England. “I call that major because it was the first time I planned a project; it involved figuring out how to do something, and then training to do it,” he said. Nonetheless, he barely made it across when the tide changed and he staggered ashore about 22-plus hours later and was promptly whisked off to hospital suffering from hypothermia.
“That probably characterized my approach to other projects-a lot of planning and a lot of preparation. It wasn’t easy-at least it wasn’t easy for me, because I’m not a very good swimmer. I was never good enough to make the varsity swim team, or anything. But I found that you can just keep going in swimming; I realized that you can swim a very long time. It took me four attempts over a period of five years before I finally succeeded.”
He completed an Ironman Triathlon, ran the Leadville 100 miler, did the Iditarod, and drove in the Le Mans 24-Hour Race. He also climbed the highest peaks on six continents. He related it was while stuck in basecamp during a storm on Everest–which he failed to climb–that he decided to take on projects where he had more physical control of the outcome. After moving to Colorado and deciding he wanted to spend half of his time on sports projects, Fossett decided there were two things in particular he wanted to do. “One was to sail a boat across the Atlantic, single-handed, and the other one was to fly a balloon around the world,” he said. “I started from scratch on those two projects in the early ’90s.”