Adventurer, 11, Ready for Flight Around Globe

Tony Aliengena, an 11-year-old San Juan Capistrano boy with a flair for video games and a tendency to airsickness, will climb into the cockpit of a single-engine plane Monday and embark on a seven-week odyssey designed to take him around the world and into the record books.

Tony’s flight across the United States and through Canada, Iceland, Scandinavia and the Soviet Union will not only place him in an elite fraternity of aviators, but will make him the youngest pilot ever to circumnavigate the globe.

The 17,000-mile journey will also be significant because the boy will become the first Westerner in recent memory allowed to pilot a plane across the Soviet Union. He will be carrying “friendship” messages to Soviet children from their counterparts in the United States.

Takeoff is scheduled from Orange County’s John Wayne Airport at 10 a.m. Monday. Tony is due back at the same airfield on July 20.

While in Moscow, Tony is scheduled to meet with Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and will present him with a 1,000-foot scroll bearing American children’s signatures. The boy will then be given a scroll signed by Soviet youngsters, which he hopes to present to President Bush upon his return.

Although it was Tony’s idea to fly around the world and set the record, the driving force behind the project has been his father, Gary Aliengena, 39, a south Orange County real estate investor. The senior Aliengena has assembled a small army of volunteers and corporate sponsors to help finance and plan everything from hotel arrangements in the Canadian Arctic to refueling and plane maintenance in Soviet Siberia. Tony will be piloting his father’s single-engine Cessna Centurion Turbo 210, a high-performance aircraft.

Cost of the trip is estimated at $142,000 and is being borne partially by members of an entourage of 17 people in Tony’s plane and two chase planes, as well as by donations raised by the Children’s Center for International Relations, a nonprofit organization in El Toro that was set up to help finance the event. The organization is run by volunteers and some paid employees who have been working to coordinate the so-called “Friendship Flight ‘89” project.

He’ll Have Company

Accompanying Tony in his plane will be his father, mother and 9-year-old sister, Alaina, as well as a Soviet pen pal and an observer from the National Aeronautic Assn., a private group which verifies world aviation records.

Tony began learning to fly at age 4 on his father’s lap during weekend family outings to the Utah Rockies and Mexico’s Baja Peninsula. His first aviation record, set on March 13, 1988, was as the youngest person to fly solo in an aircraft. Unable to fly alone in a power plane because he was not yet 16, Tony piloted an ultralight aircraft to set that record.

Then, a month later, Tony broke two more aviation records by becoming the youngest person to fly across the United States and the youngest to fly across and back. His achievements are noted in the National Aeronautic Assn.’s latest book on world and U.S. aviation and space records.

Tony insists that it is not a love for flying that pushes him to excel in the air.

“I just don’t like to sit in a car,” he said matter-of-factly.