Just a Ho-Hum Trip : Tustin Man Flies Around the World in 35 Days

It may be hard to imagine that a trip around the world in a small, single-engine plane would not be exciting, but that’s just the way Robert P. Landes of Tustin wanted it.

That there would be exotic locales to visit as well as new and interesting people to meet was something the veteran pilot expected. Excitement, however, he could do without, particularly during the times that he would spend crossing nearly 7,400 miles of open ocean.

The excitement factor--beyond the occasional radio malfunction and minor electrical problems--was kept to a minimum. Months of intensive planning and preparation by the eight teams that participated in the trip, Landes says, helped eliminate the chance for any major surprises along the 26,746-mile journey that took 35 days to complete.

“Certainly, there is an element of risk in taking a single-engine plane over that expanse of water,” Landes, 53, said of the trip that took them from California to Hawaii and then on to Australia, with stopovers in the Marshall and Solomon island chains. “I’d be foolish to deny that. And there was some apprehension. But I felt if you really prepared well, then it shouldn’t be that dangerous.”

In fact, Landes said, the biggest problems encountered on the journey, which began and ended for the eight planes and their two-pilot crews in Austin, Tex., usually occurred on the ground, although there was one incident when two of the group’s aircraft were buzzed by unidentified jet fighters off the coast of Libya.

Originally, as proposed by two pilots from Texas, the trip was just going to be a good-will flight from Austin to its sister city, Adelaide in South Australia, as part of Texas’ 150th birthday celebration, Landes said. The participants would all be flying single-engine Beechcraft Bonanzas.

Bucking Head Winds

But about six months before the scheduled June 10 departure, Landes said, “Someone pointed out if they were going that far, they might as well go the rest of the way around the world.” By going east to west, of course, they would be bucking head winds almost the entire way, which eventually added 10 hours to the projected 155 hours’ total flight time.

Landes, who has been flying for nearly 30 years and takes three afternoons a week off from his dental practice in Santa Ana to serve as a flight instructor, first heard about it from one of his former students, Dan Webb of Villa Park.

“Dan called and said, ‘Let’s fly around the world,’ ” Landes said. “Ever since Dan and I had soloed to Europe in 1979, he knew I had been looking for something else like that to do.

“I told him, ‘Give me four seconds to think about this,’ ” Landes said.

Actually, Landes says, it wasn’t quite that spur of the moment. But after giving it some thought and discussing it with his family, he decided to do it.

The ensuing months were spent preparing not only Landes’ Bonanza, but also the pilots. “We flight-tested every system on the plane and replaced anything that even seemed marginal,” Landes said. “We also studied regulations for flying into and through all the different countries. We were already to go three months before we left.”

The ultimate value of such advance preparation was driven home, Landes said, when one of the group’s planes, which was being readied almost right up to the day they all left, had to turn back twice because of problems. As a result, those two pilots ended up making the transpacific flight alone.

When the trip was first proposed, 30 teams signed up to go. By the departure date, their number was down to 10, and when the group reached San Jose, Calif.--the closest mainland airport to Honolulu--two more dropped out because “it was just out of their comfort zone to trust the mechanical reliability of the planes on that long of a flight,” Landes said.

That left the eight that would eventually complete the trip. Beside Landes and Webb, three planes from Texas, two more from Wisconsin and one from Canada, the group included a German pilot who had flown with his girlfriend from Europe to Austin and would continue on as far as Spain before returning home. Although they were traveling as a group, Landes said, very often the pilots were not in sight of each other and instead maintained contact by radio.

Landes says his biggest concern about the trip was weather and particularly the lack of up-to-date and accurate forecasts that pilots flying in the United States almost take for granted.

“The distances to some of our destinations were so great that the weather information we got before leaving some of the airports was already old,” Landes said. “Plus you add in the time it would take us to get there, and those forecasts would be 18 to 20 hours old. So, we just ended having to accept the weather that was there when we arrived.”

Another problem, but one the pilots could do something about, was making sure that they had enough fuel, especially for the open-ocean flights that lasted more than 13 hours.

By adding extra fuel tanks, Landes said, his plane’s normal six-hour range was extended to 19 hours “so that in case we got to some Pacific island and were delayed in landing by bad weather, we’d have at least three hours’ reserve.”

Fortunately, Landes said, the weather along almost their entire route was good, with the exception of monsoon rains they encountered while flying across India. And even those storms were of little consequence, contrasted with problems they would encounter once they had landed in Bombay.

“You have to understand that there are only 26 general aviation aircraft in all of India,” Landes said. “And, I guess for safety reasons, the air traffic controllers don’t like to have more than two in the air at any one time.

“When our eight aircraft flew into their control system, we seemed to cause a major crisis.”

The usual hour it had taken to refuel the planes elsewhere grew to seven in Bombay because the gas had to be pumped by hand from barrels carried on a wagon, according to Landes. And even then, he said, their problems were not over. They still had to leave.

While they had been able to do formation takeoffs everywhere else, Landes said, at Bombay they were told that only one plane could leave at a time and that there had to be half-hour intervals between each departure.

“Nobody said anything, but I guess we were all thinking the same thing after we heard that,” Landes said. “We just went ahead and taxied out and took off like we’d wanted to in the first place.”

Whether that upset the Bombay airport authorities, Landes can’t say. “We all started having radio problems just about the time we took off. Whatever they were saying was unintelligible.”

With few minor exceptions, Landes said, the rest of the trip came off without a hitch, particularly since he and Webb missed being buzzed by the fighters near Libya when they decided to go sightseeing.

“It happened on the leg that went from Egypt to Spain,” Landes said. “We decided to take a more scenic route across Greece and Italy, while two of the other planes flew the more direct route that took them through this narrow airway just off Libya.

“We were all in radio contact and a woman on one of the planes from Wisconsin was giving a position report when she just shrieked,” Landes said. “Then we didn’t hear anything at all for a while, and we were fearful they might have gone in (the ocean). Finally she came back on the air and told us what had happened.

“They had been buzzed by these two fighters, which then flew up alongside and signaled for them to land. But our pilots refused, and after a couple of more passes, the jets just left. Our people didn’t recognize the markings on the planes, and they weren’t too sure of what kind they were,” he said.

With the trip now behind him, Landes says he isn’t certain of what he will try next because “in flying you’re always looking for an extension of what you’ve already done. And how do you top a round-the-world trip?”