Uh oh. The Virgin Atlantic Global Flyer website (which btw was inaccessible for much of Monday when I checked, probably due to high website traffic volume) has announced that fuel problems may require the GlobalFlyer trip to be cancelled. Looks like 2200 lbs of fuel are missing, so Steve Fossett is "literally at the mercy of the winds" to keep the mission alive at this point.   A few more details:

The average tailwind speed needed for Steve to successfully complete the round the world circuit is 58knots and so far they are relatively hopeful as the winds have been around this speed.

When this information was released at 14:00UTC, Steve was already over 37 hours into the flight and had 5,500 pounds of fuel left.

In a couple of hours, Mission Control and Steve will have to decide whether is it safe to depart Japanese airspace for the Pacific Ocean, which is the largest ocean in the world and the most vunerable part of the route. The fuel will continue to be monitored closely up until this point and, if Steve decides he will attempt to cross the Pacific Ocean, another decision on the attempt’s continuation will be made at about halfway across on approach to Hawaii. Although Steve needed the long Salina runway to take-off, he does not need as much distance to land the aircraft and could land in Hawaii if necessary.

Wow, this brings back memories of the insanely-dangerous Pacific Ocean crossing that Sir Richard and Per Lindstrom made in the huge silver Virgin balloon a few years ago, where they somehow dropped full fuel tanks and couldn’t even abort the attempt properly, carried by the winds, and somehow reached the Candian Rockies before setting down. Given how many times Branson has been bailed out of the ocean by helicopter (six times, was it?), you can bet they’re sitting on deck waiting for the call this time too. Exciting stuff… Hope they film everything and release it all!

Update: From the Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer website, in a note from the site’s manager: "In the last two weeks, we were getting 150,000 [hits] a day, and in the last week it was 250,000 day. Up until a few minutes before Steve took off, we had just under 3 million hits! It’s still really busy, and if we carry on at this rate, we’re going to be at about 10-12 million hits in the next 24 hours. We’re going to bring in some extra servers to make it cope a litle better." Ahh, explains the site problems noted earlier.