This is a list of the fastest circumnavigation, made by a person or team, excluding orbits of Earth from spacecraft.
| People or team | Total duration (days) | Departure date | Arrival date | Notes | Reference |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Juan Sebastián Elcano and crew (originally led by Ferdinand Magellan) | 1082 | 20 September 1519 | 6 September 1522 | [1] | |
| Francis Drake and crew | 1018 | 13 December 1577 | 26 September 1580 | [1] | |
| Thomas Cavendish and crew | 781 | 21 July 1586 | 9 September 1588 | [1] | |
| Crew of the Eendracht (originally led by Willem Schouten and Jacob Le Maire) | 748 | 14 June 1615 | 1 July 1617 | [2] | |
| John Byron and crew | 676 | 2 July 1764 | 9 May 1766 | [3] | |
| George Simpson | 605 | March 1841 | October 1842 | [4] | |
| Clipper Marco Polo, Captain James "Bully" Forbes. | 175 | 4 July 1852 | 26 December 1852 | From Liverpool | [5] [6] |
| Clipper Lightning, Captain James "Bully" Forbes. | 162 | 14 May 1854 | 23 October 1854 | From Liverpool to Liverpool. | [7] |
| James Iredell Waddell and crew | 394 | 8 October 1864 | 6 November 1865 | CSS Shenandoah from London to Liverpool | [8] |
| This period is incomplete | |||||
| George Francis Train | "80 days" (excluding a month in France) | 1870 | 1870 | By ships and trains, from New York City, perhaps inspiring Jules Verne | [9] |
| Nellie Bly | 72 | 14 November 1889 | 25 January 1890 | Multiple means of transport, inspired by Jules Verne | [10] |
| George Francis Train | 67 days, 12 hours, 3 minutes | 18 March 1890 | 24 May 1890 | By ships and trains, from Tacoma, Washington | [9] [11] |
| George Francis Train | 64 days | 9 May 1891 | 12 July 1891 | By ships and trains, from Fairhaven, Washington | [9] |
| J. Willis Sayre | 54 days 9 hours and 42 minutes | 1903 | 1903 | From Seattle, via Trans-Siberian Railway. | [12] |
| Andre Jaeger-Schmidt, Henry Frederick, John Henry Mears | 36 | 2 July 1913 | 6 August 1913 | A combination of steamers, yachts, and trains | [13] |
| Linton Wells, Edward S. Evans | 28 days 14 hours 36 minutes and 5 seconds | 1926 | 1926 | A combination of boat, airplane, and trains | [14] [15] |
| John Henry Mears | 23 days 15 hours 21 minutes and 3 seconds | 1928 | 1928 | [16] | |
| Hugo Eckener | 21 days, 5 hours and 31 minutes | 8 August 1929 | 29 August 1929 | First circumnavigation in an airship, aboard LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin from Lakehurst, New Jersey | [17] [18] |
| Pilot Wiley Post and navigator Harold Gatty | 8 days, 15 hours and 51 minutes | 23 June 1931 | 1 July 1931 | Lockheed Vega aeroplane, travelled 24,903 kilometres (15,474 mi), did not cross equator | [19] |
| Wiley Post | 7 days, 19 hours, 49 minutes | 15 July 1933 | 22 July 1933 | Using an autopilot and radio direction finder, did not cross equator. From New York City | [19] [20] |
| Howard Hughes, navigator Thomas Thurlow, engineer Richard Stoddard, and mechanic Ed Lund | 3 days, 19 hours, 17 minutes [21] | 10 July 1938 | 14 July 1938 | Lockheed 14 Super Electra (NX18973) New York City; flight operations manager Albert Lodwick [22] | |
| James Gallagher and crew (United States Air Force) | 94 hours and 1 minute | 1949 | 1949 | B-50 Superfortress Lucky Lady II first aircraft to circle globe non-stop with four in-air refuelings, 37,743 kilometres (23,452 mi), did not cross equator and traveled no further south than the 20-degree parallel. | [23] |
| Col. James Morris [24] and crew (United States Air Force) | 45 hours and 19 minutes | January 16, 1957 | January 18, 1957 | Operation Power Flite , three B-52 bombers, led by Lucky Lady III, supported by at least 76 KC-76 refueling aircraft, 39,147 kilometres (24,325 mi), no equatorial crossing | [25] [26] |
| David Springbett | 44 hours and 6 minutes | 8 January 1980 | 10 January 1980 | Retains record for circumnavigation using only scheduled transportation. | [26] |
| Air France | 32 hours 49 minutes and 3 seconds | 12 October 1992 | 13 October 1992 | Concorde FAI "Westbound Around the World" and "Eastbound Around the World" world air speed records from Lisbon, Portugal. | [27] [28] |
| Michel Dupont and Claude Hetru (Air France) | 31 hours 27 minutes and 49 seconds | 15 August 1995 | 16 August 1995 | Concorde with 98 passengers and crew, no equatorial crossing | [29] |
| People or team | Total duration (days) | Departure date | Arrival date | Notes | Reference |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Steve Fossett | 13 days, 8 hours, 33 minutes | 19 June 2002 | 3 July 2002 | Spirit of Freedom balloon, first solo aircraft to fly around the world without stopping or refueling from Northam, Western Australia | [30] |
| Steve Fossett | 67 hours, 1 minute, 10 seconds | 28 February 2005 | 3 March 2005 | GlobalFlyer first solo nonstop un-refueled fixed-wing aircraft flight around the world from Salina, Kansas | [31] [32] [33] |
| Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg | 5 months | 9 March 2015 | Five months later | Solar Impulse the first round-the-world solar flight in history. | [34] |
| United States Army Air Service, Lowell H. Smith and Leslie P. Arnold, and Erik H. Nelson and John Harding Jr. | 175 calendar days, and covered 26,345 miles (42,398 km) | 17 March 1924 | 28 September 1924 | First aerial circumnavigation 363 flying hours 7 minutes; two aircraft of four Douglas World Cruisers complete the mission from Sand Point, Seattle, Washington. | [35] : 315 [36] |
| Charles Kingsford Smith, Charles Ulm, and crew | over 2 years | 31 May 1928 | June 1930 | Southern Cross from Oakland, California | [37] [38] |
| Captain Ford and Crew | one month | 2 December 1941 | 6 January 1942 | Pan American World Airways' Pacific Clipper the Boeing 314 Clipper flying boat NC-18609(A) the first commercial plane flight to circumnavigate the world from Treasure Island, San Francisco to LaGuardia Field. [39] | |
| Rutan Voyager, Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager | 9 days, 3 minutes and 44 seconds | 14 December 1986 | 23 December 1986 | first aircraft to fly around the world without stopping or refueling from Edwards Air Force Base | [40] |
| Bertrand Piccard and Brian Jones | 19 days, 21 hours, and 55 minutes | 1 March 1999 | 21 March 1999 | Breitling Orbiter 3 first balloon to fly around the world non-stop from Swiss Alpine village of Château-d'Oex | [41] |
Concorde is a retired Franco-British supersonic airliner jointly developed and manufactured by Sud Aviation and the British Aircraft Corporation (BAC). Studies started in 1954, and France and the UK signed a treaty establishing the development project on 29 November 1962, as the programme cost was estimated at £70 million . Construction of the six prototypes began in February 1965, and the first flight took off from Toulouse on 2 March 1969. The market was predicted for 350 aircraft, and the manufacturers received up to 100 option orders from many major airlines. On 9 October 1975, it received its French Certificate of Airworthiness, and from the UK CAA on 5 December.
LZ 129 Hindenburg was a German commercial passenger-carrying rigid airship, the lead ship of the Hindenburg class, the longest class of flying machine and the largest airship by envelope volume. It was designed and built by the Zeppelin Company on the shores of Lake Constance in Friedrichshafen, Germany, and was operated by the German Zeppelin Airline Company. It was named after Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, who was President of Germany from 1925 until his death in 1934.
Circumnavigation is the complete navigation around an entire island, continent, or astronomical body. This article focuses on the circumnavigation of Earth.
James Stephen Fossett was an American businessman and a record-setting aviator, sailor, and adventurer. He was the first person to fly solo nonstop around the world in a balloon and in a fixed-wing aircraft. He made his fortune in the financial services industry and held world records for five nonstop circumnavigations of the Earth: as a long-distance solo balloonist, as a sailor, and as a solo flight fixed-wing aircraft pilot.
The Rutan Model 76 Voyager was the first aircraft to fly around the world without stopping or refueling. It was piloted by Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager. The flight took off from Edwards Air Force Base's 15,000 foot runway in the Mojave Desert on December 14, 1986, and ended 9 days, 3 minutes and 44 seconds later on December 23, setting a flight endurance record. The aircraft flew westbound 26,366 statute miles at an average altitude of 11,000 feet (3,350 m).
LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin was a German passenger-carrying hydrogen-filled rigid airship that flew from 1928 to 1937. It offered the first commercial transatlantic passenger flight service. The ship was named after the German airship pioneer Ferdinand von Zeppelin, a count in the German nobility. It was conceived and operated by Hugo Eckener, the chairman of Luftschiffbau Zeppelin.
The Scaled Composites Model 311 Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer is an aircraft designed by Burt Rutan in which Steve Fossett first flew a solo nonstop airplane flight around the world in slightly more than 67 hours. The flight speed of 342 miles per hour (550 km/h) set the world record for the fastest nonstop non-refueled circumnavigation, beating the mark set by the previous Rutan-designed Voyager aircraft at 9 days 3 minutes with an average speed of 116 miles per hour (187 km/h).
A transatlantic flight is the flight of an aircraft across the Atlantic Ocean from Europe, Africa, South Asia, or the Middle East to North America, Latin America, or vice versa. Such flights have been made by fixed-wing aircraft, airships, balloons and other aircraft.
Luftschiffbau Zeppelin GmbH is a German aircraft manufacturing company. It is perhaps best known for its leading role in the design and manufacture of rigid airships, commonly referred to as Zeppelins due to the company's prominence. The name 'Luftschiffbau' is a German word meaning building of airships.
Cape Horn is the southernmost headland of the Tierra del Fuego archipelago of southern Chile, and is located on the small Hornos Island. Although not the most southerly point of South America, Cape Horn marks the northern boundary of the Drake Passage and marks where the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans meet.
DELAG, acronym for Deutsche Luftschiffahrts-Aktiengesellschaft, was the world's first airline to use an aircraft in revenue service. It operated a fleet of zeppelin rigid airships manufactured by the Luftschiffbau Zeppelin Corporation. Its headquarters were located in Frankfurt, Germany.
Grace Marguerite, Lady Hay Drummond-Hay was a British journalist, who was the first woman to travel around the world by air. Although she was not an aviator herself at first, she contributed to the glamour of aviation and general knowledge of it, by writing articles about her aerial adventures for US newspapers in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
Lucky Lady II is a United States Air Force Boeing B-50 Superfortress that became the first airplane to circle the world nonstop. Its 1949 journey, assisted by in-flight refueling, lasted 94 hours and 1 minute. The plane later suffered an accident, and today only the fuselage is preserved.
John Henry Mears was an American who made the record for the fastest trip around the world in both 1913 and 1928. He was also a Broadway producer.
The first around the world sailing record for circumnavigation of the world can be attributed to the surviving crew of Ferdinand Magellan's expedition, including the last captain Juan Sebastián Elcano who completed their journey in 1522.
The 1930 Graf Zeppelin stamps were a set of three airmail postage stamps, each depicting the image of the Graf Zeppelin, issued by the United States Post Office Department in 1930, exclusively for delivery of mail carried aboard that airship. Although the stamps were valid for postage on mail sent on the Zeppelin Pan American flight from Germany to the United States, via Brazil, the set was marketed to collectors and was largely intended to promote the route. 93.5% of the revenue generated by the sale of these stamps went to the Zeppelin Airship Works in Germany. The Graf Zepplin stamps were issued as a gesture of goodwill toward Germany. The three stamps were used briefly and then withdrawn from sale. The remainder of the stock was destroyed by the Post Office Department. Due to the high cost of the stamps during the Great Depression, most collectors and the general public could not afford them. Consequently, only about 227,000 of the stamps were sold, just 7% of the total printed, making them relatively scarce and prized by collectors.
LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin was a German passenger-carrying, hydrogen-filled rigid airship which flew from 1928 to 1937. It was designed and built to show that intercontinental airship travel was practicable. Its operational history included several long flights, such as a polar exploration mission, a round-the-world trip, trips to the Middle East and the Americas, and latterly being used as a propaganda vehicle for the ruling Nazi Party. The airship was withdrawn from service following the Hindenburg disaster.
Spirit of Freedom balloon was a Rozière balloon designed and built by Donald Cameron and Tim Cole. In 2002 solo pilot Steve Fossett flew the Spirit of Freedom to become the first successful around-the-world nonstop solo flight in any kind of aircraft. On June 19, 2002, the 10-story-high balloon Spirit of Freedom lifted off from Northam, Western Australia, and landed in Queensland, Australia, on July 3, 2002. The solo flight circumnavigation lasted 13 days, 8 hours, 33 minutes and covered 20,626.48 statute miles (33,195.10 km). They reached speeds of up to 322 kilometers per hour, and flew as high as 10,580 meters.
