March 17  2006
Once again Steve Fossett wedged himself into the Rutan designed GlobalFlyer and took-off challenging the closed-circuit flight distance record set in 1986
 
Voyager set the record when it circumnavigated the globe non-stop and on one tank of avgas - flown by Dick Rutan (brother of Burt) and Jeana Yeager (no relation to Chuck) the twin-engine piston powered (F130/R117 hp) machine took 9 days flying west just north of the equator to avoid tropical storms (the flight was in December) at around 80kts and 12,000 feet using only one engine (rear) to conserve fuel - Voyager image via previous report HERE

Steve in his flight had the luxury of cruising at over 50,000' unperturbed by bad weather and flying in an easterly direction at around 300kts taking only 74 hours 27 minutes to complete - 1/3 of Voyager's time of 9 days 3 minutes 44 seconds
 

News Desk Comment

The GlobalFlyer was flown back from England to Salina in the USA by Scaled Composite's project engineer John Karkow - Steve broke the previous record of 24,986 statute miles (US) by 334 miles
 
Previous article on Steve in February '06 HERE

March 21  2006
The Eye of a Cat 5 Tropical Cyclone (Larry) passed over Innisfail during the early hours of yesterday morning destroying homes and crops along the wake of it's very destructive path
 
The cyclonic forces tore apart a helicopter and maintenance hangar at the local airport

News Desk Comment

Living in FNQ and dealing with cyclones and their destructive elements are part of the environment and locals tend to accept the consequences
 
This time it was far worse than normal - it was the strongest Cyclone ever to pass over Innisfail - Innisfail will never be the same now!

March 21  2006
The AirCentre Web Pages continue to generate interest from around the world - latest statistics from the Internet Server show a steady improvement over the past 4 years within a similar time period - in this case January for '02 '04 and '06
 
Click image for enlargement

News Desk Comment

The saying "Statistics Don't Lie" seems close to accurate only if it involves sport - in media reports it's common knowledge that statistics are manipulated to project a certain point of view
 
These Stats are images captured from the internet service provider records and presented 'untouched'

Irrespective of the above these pages do attract a lot of attention - sad thing is that most hits go to the warbirds area and not this news page indicating lookers are just after noise and excitement - downloads (914 for Jan '06) of the "bomb.wav" - a BIG-BANG sound file - is ridiculous!