The aircraft was owned by the pilot Steve Fossett, sponsored by Richard Branson's Virgin Atlantic airline, and built by Burt Rutan's company, Scaled Composites.

The single turbofan engine is mounted in an unusual position above the fuselage at a point several feet behind the cockpit, a similar arrangement to that on the Heinkel He 162 and Cirrus Vision SF50.

The aircraft is constructed of carbon fiber reinforced plastic, the main structural member being a high-aspect-ratio single-spar wing of 114-foot (35 m) span.

Therefore, the GlobalFlyer's Williams International FJ44-3 ATW turbofan (which normally takes Jet-A fuel), was re-calibrated to burn JP-4, which has a substantially lower freezing point.

In January 2005, following solo test flights at Mojave, California, by Chief Engineer Jon Karkow and pilot Steve Fossett, Fossett moved the GlobalFlyer to the Salina Municipal Airport in Salina, Kansas, where a recently resurfaced runway of 12,300 feet (3,700 m) would accommodate the anticipated long takeoff roll.

The circumnavigation attempt was delayed until 28 February 2005 to obtain a weather forecast with low turbulence for the fragile GlobalFlyer and good tailwinds.

A tailwind was essential to making the 22,858.729 miles (36,787.559 km) that it needed to fly to meet the FAI’s definition of circumnavigation, the length of the Tropic of Cancer.

On 8 February 2006 at 12:22 UTC, GlobalFlyer took off and flew eastbound from Kennedy Space Center, and landed after 76 hours, 45 minutes with an official distance of 25,766 miles (41,466 km).

Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager had already flown the Voyager around the world in 1986, so a longer closed circuit course was needed to break their record.

He landed in Salina on March 17 after traversing a total of 25,294 miles (40,707 km) to set a new absolute distance over a closed circuit record.