FRIENDSHIP FLIGHT Tony Circles the Globe : Aviator, Dad Come Down to Earth for a While, Go Fishing

There will be few Father’s Day weekends as memorable for Gary and Tony Aliengena as the one they spent on this small North Atlantic island nation.

The father-son team from San Juan Capistrano, piloting around the world in an attempt to establish Tony as the youngest aviator ever to circumnavigate the globe, spent Saturday on the ground, fishing, after 12 days in the air crossing the United States, Canada and Greenland on the way to Europe.

After a nine-hour flight Friday across the North Atlantic, the 11-year-old aviator was determined to try his luck fishing, and he announced his intentions to do so at breakfast.

So Tony, his father and Tony’s Soviet pen pal, 10-year-old Roman Tcheremnykh, unpacked their fishing rods and set out on Saturday afternoon to test the water on a nearby lake. They returned empty-handed. “We just froze,” said Gary Aliengena, a certified pilot who has accompanied Tony in a one-engine Cessna Centurion. “We didn’t even get a bite.”

Despite their lack of luck at the lake, the stopover in Iceland was anything but dull.

It was National Day in Iceland, a day of feast and celebration commemorating the nation’s independence from Denmark on June 18, 1944.

Tens of thousands of Icelanders, decked out in colorful Nordic dress, jammed the parks and streets of this small capital, kicking up their heels to polka music, cheering on outdoor wrestling matches and providing a spectacle for tourists.

The Icelandic capital seems a long way from Boston, where Tony began the second week of his around-the-world flight Tuesday. More precisely, it was 3,000 miles, about the same distance he traveled in crossing the United States in the first week after leaving John Wayne Airport.

The Canadian crossing was the best so far of the trip, as the entourage flew over vast lakes and forests, rich in caribou, bear and moose.

Departing Boston on Tuesday, Tony encountered a large storm system with light ice at higher altitudes. The storm system persisted through Maine to the Canadian border, where the clouds broke up and the weather was clear all the way to Moncton, where Tony and his entourage from one chase plane spent the night.

With time dwindling rapidly for the Atlantic crossing, the entourage did not get a chance to visit two of Moncton’s natural attractions: the Magnetic Hill, where cars appear to roll uphill, and the Tidal Bore, where a tidal surge occurs twice daily on the Peditcodiac River.

Tony’s father and Gunter Hagen, a National Aeronautic Assn. observer aboard Tony’s plane, spent hours poring over aeronautical charts to prepare for the crossing. They also checked out survival gear required by Canadian law for transoceanic flights, including life rafts and preservers, wet suits and flares. In addition, pilots of each plane brought enough candy to sustain each passenger for five days.

On Wednesday morning, Gary Aliengena underwent questioning and an inspection of his Cessna by a Canadian aviation representative to obtain clearance to cross the Atlantic. The clearance is required in Canada only of single-engine planes.

In a coffee shop at Moncton Airport, Transport Canada inspector Bob Lavers asked the 39-year-old Aliengena such questions as how many people he could hold on his lifeboat and the types of emergency radios he had on board. Afterward, Lavers nodded his approval at Aliengena’s preparation.

Watch Weather

“Just be sure to keep a close eye on weather,” Lavers said. “It’s a very hostile environment up north, and there’s a lot of water. If you go down in the water (without wet suits and lifeboats), your chances of survival are nil.”

Tony’s group eventually arrived in Iqaluit, a village with a population of 3,000, on the shores of an inlet that plunges between the low rock hills of southern Baffin Island.

In Iqaluit, formerly known as Frobisher Bay, the weary travelers were enthralled to find a world of Inuits, polar bears and 24-hour sun.

During April, Indian natives are drawn from the surrounding High Arctic islands for Iqaluit’s Toonik Tyme carnival. The carnival, which celebrates the arrival of spring, features skinning, igloo building, ice sculpturing and a toboggan race. The highlight is the choosing of a Mr. Toonik and a queen.

Waiting at airport at Iqaluit was a delegation of Canadian dignitaries, who presented Tony with a polar bear flag and a certificate naming him and his crew members to the polar bear chapter of the Charter of Arctic Adventurers.

On Thursday, Tony got a chance to meet some Inuit youngsters about his own age. After introducing himself and answering questions from about 50 students of Nakasuk Elementary School, Tony then took turns asking questions, inquiring how many of the children had dog sleds and how sealskin tents and igloos are made.

Close Call

Afterward, Tony and Roman participated in a school track meet. But the most fun for Tony almost resulted in a serious mishap. Tony and some other youngsters on the trip had all been invited to drive around on a Hoverjet, which uses a cushion of air to glide on a frozen bay.

Tony drove the craft, as did his sister, but when Roman and another boy climbed on, they crashed into a ditch. The steering wheel of the Hoverjet was broken in the accident, but none of the youngsters were injured.

Even in Greenland, where he stopped for refueling, Tony could not escape the limelight.

Inside the terminal at Sondrestrom, a U.S . Air Force base wedged at the head of a fiord, the clerks and workers bursted with excitement at Tony’s two-hour visit.

“We hear about the boy on radio,” said Asprid Jensen, 24, a postal clerk. “Many of the clerks here asked yesterday, ‘Where’s that boy? Where’s that boy?’ ”

Tony seemed to barely notice the attention, however. Fatigued from his four-hour flight from Iqaluit to Sondrestrom, he checked into a hotel room at the airport and napped before setting out on his next 860 miles to Iceland.

In Reykjavik on Saturday night, Tony and his father finally acquiesced to a little sightseeing. They dined at the Reykjavik Cafe and afterward toured the Hofdi House, a government building where former President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev met three years ago.

There was no time to take in any of Iceland’s spectacular geologic attractions, which include volcanoes, glaciers and waterfalls.

After arriving in Oslo, Tony is scheduled to rest another day before setting out Tuesday on a relatively short 250-mile flight to Stockholm. Later in the week, he will visit Helsinki, Finland, before entering the Soviet Union on Friday at Leningrad.