This is only a part from the ongoing attempt to break the current record for circumnavigating the globe in a helicopter. What's more, the helicopter is a factory-stock Agusta Grand with no mission-specific special equipment on-board.
The current record was set in 1996 when Ron Bower and co-pilot John Williams flew a Bell 430 around the world in 17 days, 6 hours, 14 minutes and 25 seconds. The team traveled 20,508 nm with 165.1 total flight hours.
Stopping only for fuel, required maintenance checks, refueling and rest, N1US will head through western and central Europe, crossing Russia last before heading home. Covering 12 time-zones and comprising one-sixth of the earth's land mass, Russia is sparsely populated. Civilian aviation is still an anomaly and there is little ground support available in Russian territory, making this the most arduous and complicated portion of the journey.
Even though the flight is in high summer, the aircraft and its crew will have to endure ambient temperatures ranging from below freezing to well over 100°F, and must adjust flight systems to optimize the performance of the aircraft throughout the extreme range in temperature and humidity. As portions of Siberia and Greenland are within the polar ice cap, freezing temperatures could ground the mission indefinitely.
The last lap takes N1US from Nome, Alaska back to New York, itself a distance of over 4,000 miles, but miles where the language, customs, and facilities are played on the "home field". Earlier in 2007, Kasprowicz and Sheik broke the transcontinental record in N1US, so they are confident that, by flying east to west, they can make up lost time in the Final Four (thousand miles).
The Grand Adventure is about breaking a record. Live tracking(today, August 13, somewhere in Russia)