Friendship Flight, Tony Circles the Globe : Thunderstorm Roughs Up Boy Pilot

Tony Aliengena flew into a ferocious ice and thunderstorm Tuesday on the second leg of his 17,000-mile round-the-world journey, knocking out his small plane’s compass and forcing the 11-year-old navigator to negotiate a route through the treacherous Rocky Mountains with only a pocket compass.

The San Juan Capistrano youth landed safely at Centennial Airport outside Denver almost 90 minutes behind schedule, shaken but confident that the long flight through driving winds, sleet and rain might be some of the worst weather he will experience on his seven-week odyssey.

“I was . . . real tired,” Tony said immediately after landing and hopping out of his Cessna Centurion 210.

Tony’s father, Gary Aliengena, said the 550-mile trek from Salt Lake City to Denver could prove to be “the worst leg” of the entire trip.

“I don’t want anymore flights like this,” Gary Aliengena said.

The stop in Denver was only Tony’s second of his trip across the globe in his bid to become the youngest navigator to circle the world. The fourth-grade pilot left Orange County’s John Wayne Airport on Monday, alone at the controls in a single-engine plane that also carried his father, mother, sister, Soviet pen pal Roman Tcheremnykh and an observer to verify that he flies the plane by himself.

The highlight of Tony’s journey, dubbed Friendship Flight because he will deliver more than 50,000 letters from U.S. schoolchildren to Soviet youngsters, will come in Moscow, where the youngster hopes to present Mikhail S. Gorbachev with a “friendship scroll” filled with young people’s signatures collected along the way.

If the first leg of the trip Monday from Orange County to Salt Lake City went without incident, Tuesday’s phase was filled with the unexpected and the alarming.

Taking off in Salt Lake at 10:20 a.m., Tony hoped to negotiate the Rockies and land in Denver before the seasonal and often violent afternoon thunderstorms moved in. But just two hours into the trip over the Wyoming Rockies, Tony’s plane flew headlong into rough weather,

and at 17,000 feet, he noticed ice building on the wings.

A chase plane flying in front of Tony and carrying the letters, luggage and reporters, was encountering the same driving winds and sleet. Flying at 22,000 feet, pilot Lance Allyn tried to get above the storms but could not, and the passengers spent two tense hours gazing out at the dark clouds and violent flashes of lightning.

Gary Aliengena, who was communicating with Allyn over the radio, said later that Allyn’s voice became “more and more serious” as he was describing the weather and advising Tony to drop altitude to avoid the full brunt of the storm.

‘How Horrible’

Finally, the unexpected happened: One of the wings of Allyn’s plane absorbed a terrible jolt from lightning. One of the two Soviet journalists on the trip, Maxim Chikin, sat up, his eyes wide with fear, and exclaimed, “How horrible!”

Allyn said later that the lightning could not have seriously damaged the plane, though he dropped down to 12,000 feet to avoid the worst of the thunderstorms.

On Allyn’s advice, Tony then maneuvered to a lower altitude, around 13,000 feet, to avoid the sleet and ice, but he continued to encounter turbulent winds. He then tried to avoid the winds by traveling farther north and then angling down the Rockies for the final descent into Denver.

It was shortly after that, Tony recalled later, that he noticed some of the same ground landmarks he had seen earlier.

He then checked the Cessna’s gyro-directional compass, first by veering left and then right, and found that the compass needle was no longer registering. Tony’s father said later they apparently had flown in a large circle.

With the internal compass out, Tony was left halfway into the flight and facing the crossing of the Colorado Rockies with only a small backup pocket compass.

Greeted by Reporters

Using only this compass, he flew the plane south along the Front Range of the Rockies, over the mountains and finally into Centennial Airport, where he was greeted by local reporters.

Later, Tony seemed more concerned about the lightning than flying without the plane’s built-in compass.

“We came really close to lightning going right through the plane,” he said, still a bit shaken from the inclement weather.

At a Denver press conference, Tony was asked by a television reporter if it “doesn’t daunt you that you will be flying over the ocean” on his way to Northern Europe.

“No,” he replied. “It’s like flying over a lake.”

At that, his father stood and interjected: “I’ll take the ocean over the Rocky Mountains any day.”

Times staff writer Richard Beene contributed to this story from Orange County.