CAPE CANAVERAL: A fuel leak forced millionaire adventurer Steve Fossett to cancel plans to take off on Tuesday on what he hoped would be the longest ever nonstop flight.

Liftoff of the GlobalFlyer, an experimental airplane with a wingspan as wide as an 11-story building, had been scheduled for shortly after dawn from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

But minutes before the planned liftoff, Fossett was still huddled with his team on the rented runway used by Nasa’s space shuttles.

“Oh, I don’t like the look on his face,” said Virgin Atlantic chief Richard Branson, who sponsored the aircraft and who was watching Fossett on a television screen from a guest lounge near the runway.

A few minutes later, Fossett called off the flight.

At an informal press briefing on the runway, he said that although the plane’s leak could be fixed for another takeoff attempt on Wednesday, conditions in the jet stream were not favourable until Thursday at the earliest.

Fossett needs to get GlobalFlyer up to an altitude of about 45,000 feet to take advantage of the naturally occurring high-speed jet stream, which flows from the west to the east over the northern hemisphere.

In addition, temperatures for takeoff must be 54 degrees Fahrenheit (12.22 Celsius) or cooler for GlobalFlyer’s single engine to build enough thrust to ease the craft off the runway.

The plane weighs more than 11 tonnes when fully fuelled.

Fossett’s team has laid out a 26,000-mile voyage that spans the globe. After taking off from Florida, he plans to fly over the Atlantic, cross Africa, Saudi Arabia, India, China, Japan, the Pacific Ocean, Mexico, and the United States and then back over the Atlantic before landing at Kent International Airport outside London.

The flight is expected to last 80 hours.

Fossett has had problems with fuel leaks on GlobalFlyer before. During a successful attempt last year to make the first solo, nonstop circumnavigation of the globe, GlobalFlyer lost more than 3,000 pounds of fuel during its ascent.—Reuters