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Friendship Flight, Tony Circles the Globe : 11-Year-Old O.C. Pilot Ready for Global Trip

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Times Staff Writer

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 to ever 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 signed by their counterparts in the United States.

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

While in Moscow, Tony is scheduled to meet with Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev and will present him with a 1,000-foot-long scroll filled with children’s signatures. The boy will then be given a scroll signed by Soviet youngsters that 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.

$142,000 Trip

The 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 fund the event. The organization is being run by volunteers and some paid employees who have been working to coordinate the so-called “Friendship Flight ‘89” project.

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 that verifies world aviation records.

Among those riding in two chase planes will be two journalists from the Soviet Union, a Times reporter and an independent film crew from Los Angeles that hopes to produce a documentary about the trip.

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No one associated with Tony’s flight expresses the slightest doubt that the fourth-grader from St. Margaret’s School in San Juan Capistrano, who is equally adept at pinball machines and “Star Wars” video games, is capable of fulfilling his goal.

“Tony has demonstrated that he can fly an airplane,” said Wanda Odom, secretary in charge of contests and records for the National Aeronautic Assn.

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. He set his first aviation record on March 13, 1988, when he became the youngest person to fly solo in an aircraft. Unable to fly alone in an airplane because he wasn’t yet 16, Tony piloted an ultralight aircraft to set that record.

Broke 2 More Records

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 United States aviation and space records.

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

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

The boy’s only problem with flying is occasional bouts of airsickness, which he suffered last year during his coast-to-coast flight as his tiny Cessna was buffeted in Midwestern air turbulence.

Problems to Be Compounded

These problems are likely to be compounded during the around-the-world trip.

When Tony leaves the United States through Maine, he will angle almost due north to the Arctic Circle, then cut across the North Atlantic from Iqualuit, Baffin Island, a remote government outpost in Canada’s Northwest Territories.

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With daytime temperatures in the mid-30s in Iqualuit last week, Tony could face snowstorms when he attempts to cross from there to Iceland.

Weather in that part of the world is unpredictable: heavy rains, snow, sleet and long stretches of fog all are possibilities over the North Atlantic, even during summer.

“You always check the weather. It’s an unbreakable rule,” said Anne Baddour, a professional research pilot from Boston who has traversed the North Atlantic numerous times while setting world aviation speed records.

Millard Harmon, an avid pilot and retired college administrator from Albany, N.Y., remembered one occasion in which he misjudged the North Atlantic’s weather and found himself battling 50-m.p.h. head winds. Harmon, who has flown private planes twice on invited missions into Moscow, said he was forced to land in Greenland for emergency refueling.

“It’s tricky up there because you never know what you’re going to run into,” Harmon said.

Harmon added that he becomes particularly nervous crossing the North Atlantic when flying in a single-engine plane such as Tony’s, and that there is no alternative to ditching in the sea if the engine should sputter out.

Forbidding Place

“Believe me, you hear every one of those cylinders hitting when you’re flying over,” Harmon said, adding, “That North Atlantic is a forbidding kind of place to look down on, with all that ice and cold water.”

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Despite the potential dangers, Gary Aliengena expressed confidence in his son’s ability to complete the Atlantic crossing, as well as the rest of the trip, noting that the Cessna is equipped with a high-performance turbo engine and the latest in high-tech communications equipment.

Among other things, the instrument panel includes a boroscope, which conducts an instant engine analysis; a stormscope, which provides a radar look ahead at any inclement weather, and a long-range navigating system that provides--at the touch of a button--such vital information as the nearest airfield at which a plane could land in an emergency.

Aliengena also had an extra fuel tank installed, extending the Cessna’s flying range from 900 miles to 1,500 and enabling Tony to turn around, if weather dictates, to the airfield from which he departed.

The itinerary of about 3 1/2 flying hours per day is also so flexible that there will be no need to press on into bad weather, Aliengena added. In addition, there will be at least 14 days in which Tony will not fly, Aliengena said.

“I’m trying to make this as easy as possible on Tony,” Aliengena said.

Navigational Challenge

Aside from weather, another challenge facing Tony is dealing with the navigational systems of seven different countries.

Whereas the United States possesses an intricate network of ground-based radar facilities by which pilots can chart a course, the rest of the world does not, said Gunter Hagen, a retired physicist from Malibu who will be the National Aeronautic Assn.’s observer on the flight.

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Outside the United States, Hagen said, the usual method of navigation is to fly from point A to point B by holding a heading. The disadvantage of this kind of flying, he added, is that it reduces a pilot’s options for detouring around bad weather.

For nearly half the trip, Tony will probably not have to worry about navigation at all. During his 7,000-mile leg across the Soviet Union, he will be directed by a Soviet navigator, who will board in Leningrad. The navigators are required within the Soviet Union, either on board or in an accompanying plane.

Oxygen Masks on Board

During other parts of the trip, such as in Alaska, Tony will have to negotiate past towering mountain ranges. But his father’s plane is designed to soar as high as 24,000 feet and has oxygen masks that the passengers and crew would have to use at that altitude. The two chase planes, a twin-engine Beechcraft King Air and a twin-engine Cessna 421, are also both capable of flying at higher than 20,000 feet and have pressurized cabins.

Pat Wiesner, a Denver magazine publisher who will be piloting his twin-engine Cessna as one of the chase planes on the trip, expressed confidence that all of the planes will hold up nicely around the world.

“These planes are made to go through all kinds of weather, but in terms of weather this is the best time of the year to fly,” Wiesner said.

Tony’s final challenge has nothing to do with flying. It will involve his ability to deal with all the pressures and demands of constantly being in the spotlight. Already Tony has expressed weariness of one fixture of the airplane trail: press conferences at nearly every stop. His father readily agreed.

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“I tell you, I’m getting sick of explaining why we’re doing this,” Aliengena said recently.

Tony, however, still retains a sense of humor over it all. Recently, on a training flight to the family cabin in Utah, he suggested that a reporter had failed to ask a question that every other reporter had posed.

The question: “Do you have a girlfriend?”

When it was asked, Tony smiled broadly and nodded. He later volunteered: “OK, I’ll tell you my girlfriend’s first name. It’s Sarah.”

Worst Is Over

Tony’s father figures some of the worst of the trip--the planning and preparation--is already over. To gain permission for Tony to fly across the Soviet Union, his father had to fly to Moscow and cut through the massive bureaucracy there to plead his case. Permission was granted after four months of delays when the Soviets concluded that the proposed trip would enhance international relations.

Then Aliengena had to fight the bureaucracy here. As recently as two weeks ago, he was up past midnight haggling by telephone with officials at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow over delays in getting visas approved for two Soviet journalists and a 10-year-old Soviet pen pal of Tony’s who were invited to go along on the flight. The visas finally were granted a few days ago.

Finally, this past week, there was the last-minute rush to tie up loose ends. At the Friendship Flight’s rented office suite in El Toro, Aliengena and flight coordinator Guy Murrel presided over a chaotic scene of ringing telephones, stacked mail and harried receptionists, hoarsely fielding inquiries about the flight from all over the country. The office has been deluged in recent weeks with sacks full of pen pal letters that U.S. schoolchildren want delivered in Moscow.

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At his cabin in Utah two weeks ago, Aliengena surveyed the tranquil mountain scene and sighed: “I’m anxious about the trip, but I’ll be glad when it’s all over with and we can disappear up here and just be the Aliengenas again.”

Cessna Centurion Wing Span: 38 ft 10 in. Length: 28 ft 2 in. Weight (empty): 2,320 lbs Maximum Crusing Speed: 238 mph Total miles on one tank: 1,500 miles *An additional fuel tank has been added to the plane. Original range was 900 miles FRIENDSHIP FLIGHT ITINERARY JUNE

SUN MON TUE WED THUR FRI 4 5 6 7 8 9 Orange Salt Lake Denver, Lincoln, St. Louis, Washington, County City, Utah Colorado Nebraska Missouri D.C. 11 12 13 14 15 16 Lawrence, Septiles, Iqualuit, Iqualuit, Reykjavik, Reykjavik, Mass. Canada Canada Canada Iceland Iceland 18 19 20 21 22 23 Oslo, Stockholm, Stockholm, Helsinki, Helsinki, Leningrad, Norway Sweden Sweden Finland Finland U.S.S.R. 25 26 27 28 29 30 Leningrad, Moscow, Moscow, Moscow, Moscow, Moscow, U.S.S.R. U.S.S.R. U.S.S.R. U.S.S.R. U.S.S.R. U.S.S.R.

SUN SAT 4 10 Orange Lawrence, County Mass. 11 17 Lawrence, Oslo, Mass. Norway 18 24 Oslo, Leningrad, Norway U.S.S.R. 25 Leningrad, U.S.S.R.

JULY

SUN MON TUE WED THUR FRI 2 3 4 5 6 7 Tumen, Omusk, Kemerovo, Bratsk, Bratsk, Mirnyi, U.S.S.R. U.S.S.R. U.S.S.R. U.S.S.R. U.S.S.R. U.S.S.R. 9 10 11 12 13 14 Yakutsk, Ohotsk, Magadan, Magadan, Anadyr, Providenia, U.S.S.R. U.S.S.R. U.S.S.R. U.S.S.R. U.S.S.R. U.S.S.R. *Nome, Alaska 16 17 18 19 20 21 Anchorage, Juneau, Seattle, Oakland, Orange Alaska Alaska Wash. Calif. County 23 24 25 26 27 28 Return to **U.S.S.R.

SUN SAT Kuibyshev, U.S.S.R. 2 8 Tumen, Yakutsk, U.S.S.R. U.S.S.R. 9 15 Yakutsk, Anchorage, U.S.S.R. Alaska 16 22 Anchorage, Alaska 23 29

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* Next day but after crossing International Dateline.

** Soviet members of party only.

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