An average speed of 136.7 km/h is 73.8 knots, and the crew’s own release rounds it to 74. The Grand’s maximum cruise is 155 knots. The record was set at roughly half the speed the aircraft is capable of, which means the circumnavigation record has never really been a speed record. It is a record about how little you stop.
For the 1996 flight both numbers were published, so the split can be computed exactly: 20,508 nm flown in 165.1 flight hours, inside an elapsed time of 414 hours 14 minutes. That leaves 249.1 hours, or 60.1 percent of the entire record, spent not flying.
For 2008 nobody ever published the equivalent. It is in the flight recorder attached to the FAI record file, and integrating that log answers it: 144 hours airborne of 271 elapsed, which leaves 127 hours, 47 percent of the record, on the ground. The figure is stable. Counting anything above 3 knots as flying gives 146 hours and anything above 30 knots gives 140, so it is 143 give or take three whichever way it is cut.
That is what makes the record hard to take. Kasprowicz flew 21 fewer hours than Bower and finished nearly six days sooner. Almost none of that came from going faster. It came from spending half as long standing still.
AgustaWestland’s release of 19 August 2008 gives two averages in one sentence: “an average speed of 74 knots over the entire 11 days including stops with an average speed of 150 knots over the ground.” The ratio of those, 74 / 150, implies 133.7 hours airborne and 137.3 on the ground, and an earlier version of this page carried those figures. They are close, and they are wrong by about ten hours in each direction. The recorder is measured. The ratio was inferred.
| Figure | Source | Value |
|---|---|---|
| Elapsed time | FAI record listing | 271.08 h |
| Airborne | Flight recorder, integrated above 5 kt | 144 h |
| On the ground, the remainder | Derived, elapsed less airborne | 127 h · 47% |
| Average speed, whole record | AgustaWestland | 74 kt |
| Average groundspeed while flying | AgustaWestland | 150 kt |
| Airborne implied by those two, superseded | 74 / 150 × 271.08 | 133.7 h |
The crew put their own comparison against Ron Bower’s 1996 Bell 430 on their site before departure. In five of six categories the aircraft they were chasing was the better machine.
The crew’s own comparison, published before departure
| Bower · Bell 430 · 1996 | Kasprowicz · A109S Grand · 2008 | |
|---|---|---|
| Fuel | ~400 gal auxiliary, plus fuel carried in the sponsons | 213 gal factory capacity, no auxiliary storage |
| Range | over 500 nm | about 400 nm |
| Crew rest | A flight accessible bunk. One pilot could sleep while the other flew. | None. No modification of any kind for endurance flying. |
| Weight | 9,300 lb, 300 lb above its certified maximum gross, under special provision from Bell | Below certified gross |
| Crew | Included a factory pilot supplied by Bell | Two private aviators |
| Cruise | 230 km/h achieved average | 287 km/h maximum cruise |
The fuel stops were never published as a list. They are in the flight recorder attached to the FAI record file, and counting every episode where the aircraft sat still for three minutes or more gives 78 stops at 74 unique fields, which is exactly the count FAI and the press quote without ever naming one of them.
That log also settles the argument this page is built on. 121.9 of the 271.1 elapsed hours were stationary at recorded stops (minimum), counting only pauses of three minutes or more and excluding taxiing. A challenger does not have to fly faster than N1US. It has to stop better.
What the log shows is a crew that almost never stopped for long. The median turnaround was 31 minutes, twenty five of the seventy eight were under twenty, and the shortest was three. Seventy eight times they landed, took fuel and got airborne again, most of it at small fields with no handling and nobody expecting them.
Both awarded to the manufacturer
Igor I. Sikorsky International Trophy. The Vertical Flight Society’s award for a company whose helicopter establishes an official world record. Its own citation for the 2009 award reads: “On August 18, 2008, a factory standard AgustaWestland Grand helicopter, flown by pilots Scott Kasprowicz and Steve Sheik, set a new world speed record for circling the globe in only 11 days and seven hours.”
AHMEC Achievement Award. The American Helicopter Museum and Education Center’s citation is unambiguous about what prompted it: “This record-breaking flight earned AgustaWestland the inaugural AHMEC Achievement Award.” The award exists, in its first instance, because of this flight.
Bower’s configuration buys endurance: longer legs, fewer landings, a bed. Kasprowicz traded all of it for roughly 25 percent more speed, and flew east, putting the prevailing westerlies behind the aircraft instead of in front of it.
What that leaves for anyone coming after is an unusually unforgiving problem. The target is not a cruise speed. It is 76.7 knots held for eleven days, averaged across every landing, every refuel, every customs queue and every night. Nothing about the aircraft gets you there. The arithmetic is all in the turnarounds.
213 gallons against roughly 400. Every gallon of that difference is a landing the Grand had to make and the Bell did not.
Against a book range near 400 nm. Very little reserve was being left on the table, in parts of the world with few alternates.
Flown below its certified gross weight on its ordinary certification. Bower’s aircraft flew 300 lb over gross under a manufacturer’s special provision.
They lost a whole day at Okhotsk and still finished almost six days clear. A challenger has to beat the 2008 flight minus its worst day.
20,784 nm inside 271.1 hours. The Grand cruises at 150. Everything between those two numbers is time on the ground, and that is the whole contest.
Seventy eight of them, for eleven days straight, with two pilots and no relief crew. Twenty eight legs ran past 300 nm against a book range near 400.
The slack is the part that should worry a challenger most. Okhotsk cost them 19 hours 22 minutes and Evensk another 17 hours, both waiting on Russian clearances rather than on the aircraft. Strip those two stops out and the same flight lands in 234.7 hours. That, not 271, is the number a serious attempt is really chasing, because an attempt that plans well enough to avoid a two day hold in the Russian far east has to be measured against a 2008 flight that did not.
