Global Express to challenge world record
Bombardier’s Global Express has demonstrated its speed and range capabilities logging 19 world records but the aircraft is now being readied to bid for a r

Bombardier’s Global Express has demonstrated its speed and range capabilities logging 19 world records but the aircraft is now being readied to bid for a record that has remained unbroken since October 1977. In that year a PanAm Boeing 747SP circled the globe at an average speed of 423 knots, taking 54 hours, seven minutes and 12 seconds, flying from San Francisco with stopovers at London-Heathrow, Cape Town International and Auckland airports.

Now, for the first time in three decades, an attempt to beat the existing International Aeronautical Federation (FAI) record for flying round the world over both the North and South Poles is in the final planning stages, with the TAG TransPolar08 mission on a Global Express business jet preparing to depart from its base at the company’s Farnborough base near London.