EON

San Francisco/Washington – Steve Fossett has set several world records, but the US adventurer had not returned Wednesday from his latest routine flight.

Scores of private planes and rescue aircraft were looking for the 63-year-old – missing since Monday – in a rugged desert area in the state of Nevada.

Fossett, who piloted the first non-stop solo balloon flight around the world and repeated the feat in an airplane, intended to check out a runway that might be suitable for a new record. In November, he planned to break a speed record which stands since 1997.

Fossett, power sleeper and extreme sportsman, collects records on air, land and sea.

He took off late Monday from a private airstrip over 100 kilometres south-west of Reno in a single-engine Citabria Super Decathlon in what looked like a routine flight, according to US media.

Friends and relatives have said he planned to return only a few hours later.

Fossett had enough fuel for a flight of between three and four hours flight and also had an emergency alert mechanism on board his plane, the reports said.

“Steve is a tough old boot,” his friend Richard Branson said in a statement. The British billionaire founder of the airline Virgin Atlantic, has sponsored many flying records and used them for publicity purposes.

Branson fears that Fossett may have been forced to make an emergency landing and may be hurt.

“I suspect he is waiting by his plane right now for someone to pick him up,” Branson said.

Fossett once made an emergency landing and walked 50 kilometres to get help.

It would be a great PR coup if the billionaire Fossett could emerge unscathed after holding the world’s attention with a days-long rescue operation ahead of his next record attempt in November.

The search for the small airplane is difficult, particularly since Fossett did not file a flight plan, according to the National Guard in Nevada.

The two-seater plane is often used for acrobatic flight manoeuvres. Broadcaster CNN reported that Fossett did not have a parachute.

Rescue teams described the area in which the adventurer is believed to have gone missing as partially mountainous and hard to access. Because of that, the search for a small plane from the air is “kind of like looking for a needle in a haystack,” they have said.

Rescue efforts in an area of over 1,500 square kilometres are being made more difficult by strong winds.

Fossett set the world record for distance without landing with a dramatic flight around the world in February 2006. He took off in his light airplane GlobalFlyer from Florida and flew once round the world and twice over the Atlantic.

According to the Federation Aeronautique Internationale (FAI), he needed less than 77 hours to fly 41,467 kilometres.

This was Fossett’s 110th world record in five different disciplines. More than half of his records remain unbroken. He made the first non-stop solo flight around the globe in a hot-air balloon in 2002, and in 2005, on board the GlobalFlyer, he became the first man to make a non-stop solo flight around the world in an airplane.