FRIENDSHIP FLIGHT: Tony Circles the Globe : Press Finds Boy Aviator Likes to Act His Age

Some people might relish the attention, but chances are their lives are hardly as young and fresh and full of promise as that of 11-year-old Tony Aliengena.

So if this youngster would rather watch cartoons or send a paper airplane sailing across a room full of serious-minded adults than appear on national television, write it off to the frivolity and innocence of youth.

But Tony cannot escape the limelight, and as the San Juan Capistrano fourth-grader continues his quest to become the youngest person to fly an airplane across the world, there are few places where he is not considered to be news.

It’s enough to make the shy, soft-spoken preteen break into a huge grin on one those rare occasions--like his stop in Moncton, Canada--when the press isn’t around to greet his arrival.

The Moncton stop stood in stark contrast to his European landfall here and United States stops in Salt Lake City, Denver, Lincoln, Neb., and St. Louis, where Tony was greeted like a politician on the campaign trail, stepping out of his small Cessna Centurion to the flash and whirl of cameras.

Waiting at the airports were throngs of local reporters, as they were here, where Norwegian news photographers asked him in thickly accented English to sit astride his plane’s propeller for pictures.

Everywhere, reporters have been ready to pounce on Tony with the same questions he had answered a dozen times before. Tony has politely fielded the inquiries and posed for pictures, but he has quickly tired of the press attention.

At a stop in suburban Boston, it was all Tony could do to pull himself away from a card game and do yet another interview with local television, this one with WLVI reporter Joe Shortsleeve.

The interview went like this:

Reporter: “How did you pick out where you were going to stop?”

Tony: “Umm, it was the easiest way around the world.”

Reporter: “Are you excited?”

Tony: “Yeah.”

Reporter: “Anything else I should have asked you?”

Tony: “No.”

With that, Tony dashed off to more enjoyable pursuits.

Gary Aliengena, Tony’s father, said his son does not like dealing with the press because he finds it tiring--more tiring, it seems, than flying an airplane for hours on end.

The reporter, Shortsleeve, said he was not surprised to find Tony so unenthusiastic about his trip.

“That’s the way he was when we interviewed him last year (following Tony’s record-breaking flight, at age 9, across the United States),” Shortsleeve said. “The problem we have, as reporters, is we don’t normally interview 11-year-olds and can’t relate.

“Now, if we had an 11-year-old asking him questions, he’d probably do a lot better.”

Pat Wiesner, a Colorado businessman who is piloting one of the two chase planes for the flight, said that as father of a 10-year-old boy, he understands Tony’s predicament with the press.

“What you’ve got is an 11-year-old doing a very adult thing like flying around the world. But he is still just an 11-year-old kid,” said Wiesner, 52, whose son, Michael, is accompanying Wiesner and his wife, Janet, on the trip.

Tony is always accompanied at press gatherings by his father, a certified pilot who is riding with his son in the co-pilot’s seat. Aliengena, 39, a real estate investor, is close at hand to help Tony field questions.

Tired of the constant grilling from the press, Tony is apt to answer questions as he did in Lincoln, when a reporter inquired how long the trip was.

Tony’s response: “Umm, it’s long.”

In the press conferences, Tony’s boyishness is underscored by the fact he has to stand on a chair to be seen over the lectern. He also needs a booster seat in his plane to see out the windshield.

Tony is in the habit of horsing around with other members of the entourage before and after the press questioning. He is accompanied on the trip by his 10-year-old sister, Alaina, and 10-year-old Roman Tchermenekyh, his Soviet pen pal, in addition to Wiesner’s son..

And Tony is not immune to childish antics. Before a Denver press session, for instance, he sent a paper airplane sailing across the room as his father spoke.

Tony is equally unimpressed with big-time celebrity journalists.

When Guy Murrel, the public relations consultant for the trip, arranged an interview between Tony and his father and Jane Pauley on NBC’s “Today” show, Tony responded to the news with typical aplomb.

“Who’s Jane Pauley?,” he asked.

Roman (pronounced Ro-mar) has become almost as much of a media curiosity as Tony. At every press conference and public gathering, Tony introduces Roman as his pen pal, and Roman is called to the podium, usually wearing an oversized baseball cap and a shy smile.

But Roman, who is the son of a powerful air minister who helped approve Tony’s flight across the Soviet Union, knows little English and usually manages only a weak, “Hi, I Roman.” He smiled widely in St. Louis, though, when a reporter asked through an interpreter what he had liked most about his journey across the United States.

“The most exciting thing was the amusement park in California and the cowboy saloon in Denver,” Roman said, referring to his visits at Knott’s Berry Farm in Buena Park and a country-western steakhouse in Denver.

After Tony’s “Today” appearance in Boston, his interpreter, Maxim V. Chikin, a correspondent for the Moscow youth newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda, arranged for him to be interviewed by telephone by a reporter for the Soviet news agency, Tass.

Later that same morning, he signed autographs for a mob of 300 elementary school students who had unfurled the 1,000-foot banner of U.S. friendship signatures that he hopes to deliver to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow.

The next morning, however, Tony got to do what he really likes: he sat in front of the television, along with Roman and the other two children, watching cartoons.