What constitutes a balloon distance or duration record?
The Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI) is responsible for establishing the rules for duration and long distance flight records. According to the FAI sporting code, Fossett’s balloon is a class AM balloon, which is defined as a free balloon that uses both a lighter-than-air gas and an airborne heater, without a pressurized envelope. In order to break the duration record Steve Fossett must be aloft for a time interval from take-off until landing in a single flight that exceeds the current record. The current record is 233 hours and 55 minutes set in January 1998 by Bertrand Piccard and his crew. To set the record Steve Fossett must exceed the existing record time by at least 1 percent. The distance record is determined by a set of great circle arcs along the track between the take-off point and landing point during a single flight. These arcs cannot be shorter than half the radius of the Earth, 3185.5 km, and the average distance between arcs must not be less than 6371 km (Eart
