Members of the support team behind the US balloonist, Steve Fossett, expressed relief yesterday that he had been spotted alive after crashing in the sea off Australia.
"We've been sweating bullets for about eight hours. Now we're feeling pretty good," said Mr Joe Ritchie, the team member in charge of rescue efforts at the control centre at Washington University, in St Louis, Missouri.
He said a French aircraft sent from New Caledonia sighted Fossett at daybreak and dropped emergency supplies, including food and water.
Mr Ritchie said it would be another 10 hours before a ship could reach the scene, in part because the area is broken by reefs and is off normal shipping lanes. Two ships were trying to reach the area, he said.
"He was exactly where we would expect," he added.
Mr Mark Wrighton, chancellor of Washington University, told CNN television that Fossett was alive. "We don't know . . . why he had to make a descent," he said.
The search plane was guided to the raft by emergency locator beacons whose signals were picked up by satellite, providing information on drift and location.
Fossett, on the 10th day of his fourth attempt to become the first balloonist to circle the globe nonstop, went down about 500 miles north-east of Australia.
Fossett had travelled 24,460 km - more than halfway in his bid which began in South America - when the weather deteriorated, said the expedition's chief weather expert, Mr Bob Rice.
In the Australian capital, Canberra, a maritime rescue spokesman said the French search plane had dropped a life raft to Fossett and he had climbed into it.
Information on Fossett's journey can be found on the Internet at http://solospirit.wustl.edu.