A team of long-range shooting experts in Wyoming set what appears to be the new world record for the longest rifle shot ever completed: 7,774 yards or 4.4 miles.
Scott Austin and Shepard Humphries led the team from Nomad Rifleman, a shooting range and instruction center based in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. The custom bolt-action rifle was chambered in .416 Barrett, and the hand-lathed 422-grain bullet took 24.5 seconds to reach the target.
Humphries described feeling “elated and relieved” when he heard through the radios that the bullet had hit the target. “We all contributed so much time, effort, and money into this project, and as with anything that has not been done before, the chances are slim that you will succeed,” he told MeatEater. The team took 69 shots the day they set the record, and their final shot miraculously hit the eight-inch center circle. The white rectangular target measured 10 feet wide and seven feet, eight inches tall–or about 1.7 MOA. Hitting the center circle was equivalent to putting a bullet on an area the size of a pinhead at 100 yards, Humphries explained.
Wind was their biggest enemy on the day of the shoot, Humphries said. They shot in the morning when it was relatively calm, but every time the wind velocity changed even a single mile-per-hour, the team had to adjust their point of aim to 26 feet.
To complicate matters even further, they had no way of judging the wind at every point along the bullet’s flight path. At a microscopic level, wind, pressure, and humidity can change from one cubic foot to the next and at every moment within the same cubic foot. “Even if we could know with 100% accuracy the ‘environmentals’ at the moment the trigger was pressed, we could not predict what that cubic foot would be 20-something seconds later as the bullet passed through,” Humphries explained. “There were over 23,000 of those cubic feet.”
Making an accurate wind call was virtually impossible, and spotting the bullet impact also presented a challenge. By the time the bullet reached the target, it had slowed down to 689 feet-per-second and didn’t produce a consistent dust signature.
So, Austin and Humphries developed what they call “audio spotting.” They constructed bulletproof bunkers at various points around the target, and team members sat in them listening and watching for the impact of the bullet. They communicated with one another to triangulate the hit and relayed that information to the team at the gun.
Using this system, they walked the shooter (whose name is being kept private at his request) into the target. The final wind and elevation call was 1,092 MOA up and 17 MOA left.
There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self. -Ernest Hemingway The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything.-- Edward John Phelps
