CHICAGO - Adventurer Steve Fossett decided to try to complete his bid to make the first nonstop solo airplane flight around the world without refueling despite a fuel shortage, his team said. Fossett was past Hawaii on Tuesday at midnight EST (0500 GMT), pushed eastward toward the United States by stronger-than-expected tail winds. The pilot also had altered course slightly hoping for a landing early Thursday afternoon in Kansas at the airfield from which he took off Monday night. "Go for it," the ground team quoted the 60-year-old millionaire former markets trader as saying after he had completed more than 80 percent of the globe-circling flight in an experimental plane powered by a single jet engine. There had been speculation that he would be forced to land in Hawaii because of an unexplained loss of fuel early in the flight; but his control center in Salina, Kansas, said they hoped he would be able to complete the circuit as planned. The plane can land on any size landing strip.

Fossett, the first to make a solo balloon trip around the world nonstop, hoped to make the 37,000 km trip in a little less than three days. While he would be the first to make such a journey as a solo pilot, his feat might not become an official record according to the Paris-based Federation Aeronautique

Internationale. Jeana Yeager and Dick Rutan hold that mark for the first nonstop, unrefueled global flight in 1986 with a nine-day circumnavigation covering 42,430 km. The federation had said Fossett might qualify for a speed record.

Reuters