Where every number comes from

Airborne 144 h, ground 127 h, of 271.1 h elapsed. Measured by integrating the flight recorder: any interval where the aircraft was making more than 5 knots over the ground counts as flying. The result barely moves with the threshold, 146 h at 3 knots and 140 h at 30, so the answer is 143 give or take three. Counting instead by discrete stops, every episode of three minutes or more inside a 600 m circle, gives 121.9 h on the ground, which is a floor because it misses taxiing and short pauses. It replaces an earlier estimate of 133.7 h airborne that was inferred from the ratio of two published average speeds.

The departure was in darkness, and this site had it wrong. It was argued here that the crew’s “Good morning… finally underway” and a television crew at LaGuardia ruled out a pre dawn start. Three sources say otherwise: AgustaWestland’s own release gives 03:14, Aviation International News gives “just after 3 a.m.”, and the first fix in the flight recorder is 03:10 Eastern. Sunrise at LaGuardia that morning was about 06:00.

Sun position. Computed from the replay clock and position by the standard NOAA method. It is only as good as the clock it is fed, and the clock is pinned to twelve dated positions from the dispatches.

The route is no longer reconstructed. Every field the aircraft touched is now taken from its own flight recorder. What remains inferred is the path between them, which is drawn as a great circle rather than the track actually flown.

Every takeoff and every landing. No departure or arrival was recorded anywhere. What the replay flies is the standard shape for the type: light on the wheels, a low hover, the nose down to accelerate through translational lift, then the climb away, and at the far end a decelerating approach, a nose-up flare, a hover and a vertical settle. Not one second of it is documented.

• Elapsed time is reported as 11d 7h 2m in some sources and 11d 7h 5m in others. Calculations here use 11d 7h 5m. The three minute difference changes no conclusion.
• The number of countries differs by source. AgustaWestland’s release gives 18, which is the figure used here, and the FAI’s own ten year retrospective of 18 August 2018 gives 15. The same two disagree on states as well, 49 against 30. Sampling every leg’s great circle against national borders returns 18: thirteen countries with a landing in them, and five more crossed without landing, Belgium, Czechia, Estonia, Lithuania and the Netherlands.

As far as we can tell this list has not been published before. FAI quotes the count and prints a ten point summary of the course. The press quotes the count and names almost nothing. The stops themselves are in the log attached to the record file, so they can simply be read out: 78 landings at 74 unique fields, in order, with the time of arrival and the minutes spent on the ground.

The coordinates are the log’s own. The field names are ours, matched to the nearest airport, and the last column gives that match distance in kilometers so every identification can be checked rather than taken on trust. The worst in the whole route is Novosibirsk at 3.1 km; most are inside a kilometer. Times are UTC, from a logger running about five hours behind it.

The flight recorder log. FAI record file 15127 carries one attached document, the Garrecht Volkslogger trace of the whole circumnavigation, 8,412 fixes. It is the only primary artefact of the flight in public hands. FAI links it with the wrong extension, so the link on their own page is dead; the file is at old.fai.org/download/RECS/15127-1.zip. Reading it gives the route, the stop times and the ground total on this site.

The FAI record files. #15127 (E-1e, eastbound), #15170 (E-1, eastbound) and #15171 (E-Absolute) were all ratified for this flight, and #15122 covers the New York to Redhill leg flown inside it. They publish a ten point summary of the course, not the full list. The live site blocks automated access; the legacy database at old.fai.org answers.

FAI Sporting Code Section 9, para 5.3.5. The rules the flight was judged against: the course must start and finish in the same place, cross every meridian, run at least 36,787.559 km, keep every control point below 66°33′, and count all time on the ground as flying time.

The crew’s own dispatches. grandadventure08.com is long dead. The Internet Archive holds eight distinct captures of the front page during the flight, and because that page listed the whole run of posts rather than only the newest, the later captures preserve earlier days. Twenty dispatches survive between 15 June and 17 August.

Contemporary reporting. Aviation International News, 29 August 2008, is the only reported feature rather than a recycled release, and it supplies the engine shutdown, the Gambell fuel drums and the Ironwood preflight. AgustaWestland’s own releases give the departure time and the Redhill landing. Pulkovo Airport’s press office recorded the St Petersburg arrival. Вертолетная индустрия, December 2008, covers the Russian legs from the Russian side.

What does not survive. The live tracking map drew on a feed at rushdb01.com that was never archived anywhere. The seventeen podcasts survive as titles only, with neither audio nor captions. The forum was never captured with any content in it.

Satellite imagery from Esri, Maxar and Earthstar Geographics. Roads, labels and building footprints from OpenStreetMap via OpenFreeMap and OpenMapTiles. Elevation from AWS Terrain Tiles, derived from SRTM and GMTED. Map rendering by MapLibre GL JS, aircraft by three.js.

The airframe is modeled from the dimensions the crew published, 12.96 m long with an 11.00 m rotor, and painted from the one surviving photograph. The one photograph of N1US that appears to survive in public is reproduced on the aircraft page, from the FAI’s page for the record, and is credited there. Every other photograph on this site shows the type or the place, not N1US itself.

Image note. The record is from 2008 and the surviving photographs are old and small. Several have been upscaled and cleaned up with AI tooling, and some scenes have been reconstructed the same way from the source material. Nothing here is invented, and nothing has been altered to change what it shows.

Primary sources

• grandadventure08.com, archived 10 to 19 August 2008
• Fédération Aéronautique Internationale record listing
• Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, ten year anniversary retrospective, 18 August 2018
• AgustaWestland press release, New York, 19 August 2008
• The Washington Post, 19 August 2008
• Vertical Flight Society and American Helicopter Museum award citations