FRIENDSHIP FLIGHT: Tony Circles the Globe : The Brain Trust : Boy Aviator Flies, but Experienced Pilots Make Key Decisions

To qualify as the youngest aviator to fly around the world, 11-year-old Tony Aliengena has had to remain in sole control of his father’s single-engine plane.

But while the fourth-grader from San Juan Capistrano has single-handedly flown the craft nearly halfway around the globe, the key decisions regarding flight routes and whether to fly in inclement weather have been made by his father, Gary Aliengena, and three other adult pilots on the trip.

Tony has participated rarely in airport briefings attended by the adult pilots. Instead, he has watched cartoons, played with children his own age or slept until his father told him it was time to go.

Aliengena said he saw nothing wrong with Tony not being involved in every aspect of the flight. He likened his role to that of a commercial airline co-pilot whose job is to prepare the flight plan for the pilot. In the cockpit, Aliengena said, Tony makes all the critical decisions, such as whether to ascend or descend to avoid bad weather. He does get plenty of advice from his father in the co-pilot’s seat and from Gunter Hagen, a National Aeronautic Assn. observer who is going along to verify that Tony remains in control.

Aliengena also serves as the plane’s pilot-in-command, since Tony is too young to get a pilot’s license. Aliengena can seize control of the plane at any time if he decides Tony cannot handle an emergency situation.

So far, though, Aliengena has not had to touch the controls.

In planning for the flight and plotting strategy, the clear leader of the adult pilots has been Aliengena, a 39-year-old real estate investor.

The other pilots have included Dr. Lance Allyn, 46, an orthopedic surgeon from Hanford, Calif., in one chase plane and Pat Wiesner, 52, a Denver magazine publisher, in the other chase plane. Hagen, 58, a retired physicist from Malibu, also is a veteran pilot.

Wiesner was forced to drop out of the trip after he was stranded in Greenland for four days because of an equipment problem. Wiesner had been carrying four members of a Los Angeles film crew, who are now taking commercial flights to keep up with Tony.

Although all four pilots have many years of aviation experience, their styles have differed so markedly that some personality clashes have resulted, particularly between Aliengena and Wiesner.

Aliengena is a bold pilot whose former pastimes of aerobatics and sky diving make him unafraid to venture out in bad weather. “I don’t worry about the weather until it’s time to fly,” he said. “Then I work around it.”

Wiesner is an ultraconservative pilot who frets about such matters as excess aircraft weight and who dislikes conversation in flight. On the eve of the June 16 Atlantic crossing, Wiesner and Aliengena exchanged tense words over the fact that Wiesner was considering sending three people from his plane aboard a commercial jet to reduce weight.

“Pat, you’ve had a long time to prepare for this,” Aliengena said angrily in a hotel room in arctic Canada.

Hagen and Allyn, like Wiesner, exhibit a conservative aviation style. Last week, for instance, they sat up nights to pore over aviation charts, planning and re-planning for the flight’s biggest challenge: crossing the North Atlantic.

But they, like Aliengena, are more inclined to extend themselves than Wiesner. On the matter of weight, for example, Allyn has continually carried as much as 500 pounds more cargo than his twin-engine Beechcraft King Air was designed to hold.

They also are inclined to talk and joke in the cockpit. Allyn even let film-crew member Shawn Hardin fly his plane for an hour above the frozen tundra of northern Canada.

And Hagen, though he frequently worried about weather, has always climbed aboard Tony’s plane.

“The problem I have is that I’m just along for the ride,” said Hagen. “But I promised myself that I wouldn’t fly if I thought it was unsafe.”

Aliengena, daring as he is, knows better than to send his son into a raging thunderstorm. For that reason, Tony detoured 100 miles to escape a severe line of storms over the Rocky Mountains. Aliengena also took the precaution of sending his wife, Susan, and 10-year-old daughter, Alaina, in Allyn’s King Air when it came time to cross the North Atlantic.

Another strain between the pilots occurred as the flight from Canada began.

Both Wiesner and Allyn had expressed concern over their weight load in Boston, where they arranged to have 1,000 pounds of unnecessary luggage and equipment shipped ahead to Europe or back to California. Much of the equipment belonged to the film crew.

Allyn and Wiesner, who was piloting a twin-engine Cessna Golden Eagle, explained that for every 200 pounds of extra weight they lost half an hour’s worth of flying time before needing to re-fuel. Over the United States, where there are numerous airports and the flight legs were relatively short, fuel capacity was not an overriding concern.

But over the North Atlantic--where one leg consisted of 1,000 miles over water--a five- to six-hour flight--the pilots considered it essential that they maintain plenty of fuel. Aliengena had to worry less about fuel because he had modified his single-engine Cessna Centurion 210 to increase its flying range from 900 to 1,500 miles. Optimum range on the two twin-engine planes is about 1,400 miles.

On the night before the crossing, Wiesner and Allyn calculated their respective weights and concluded that Allyn was 500 pounds overweight, while Wiesner was about 300 pounds over.

“What we’re talking about here is margin of comfort,” Wiesner said. “And I’m not comfortable.”

Since most excess luggage had already been removed in Boston, Wiesner and Allyn decided that the only other way they could lighten their planes was to send some passengers commercially. A member of the film crew was flown to Oslo to await Tony, while Wiesner’s wife and son were flown home to Denver.

The idea was for Wiesner, who now had only three people in his plane, to take one of the six people Allyn had been ferrying.

The carefully laid plans went awry, however, when Wiesner inadvertently left the Iqaluit Airport on Canada’s Baffin Island without taking any of Allyn’s passengers. Allyn did not notice until Sue Aliengena notified him on the runway that there were six life preservers for seven people. The seventh life preserver had been placed in Wiesner’s Cessna in anticipation of an extra passenger there.

“I thought you were going to take five and me six,” Allyn radioed to Wiesner as the two planes soared above an Arctic wasteland of glaciers and icebergs.

“Well, you could have asked someone to come my way,” Wiesner responded, sounding slightly miffed.

“OK, it’s my fault,” Allyn radioed, shaking his head in exasperation.

The additional weight proved to be no problem on the 600-mile flight to Sondrestrom, Greenland. But during the next, 900-mile leg to Reykjavik, Iceland, Wiesner encountered a problem that had nothing to do with weight. And his handling of the problem again differentiated him from Aliengena and Allyn.

Wiesner was about an hour out of Sondrestrom--cruising above Greenland’s two-mile-thick icecap--when his directional compass went out. He decided to turn back to Sondrestrom for fear of becoming lost over the open Atlantic.

Both Aliengena and Allyn said that they would have pressed on, had the same problem happened to them because they could simply follow the other two planes.

Wiesner later said he wished that he had continued on because when he returned to the U.S. Air Force base at Sondrestrom, he was stuck there without a mechanic or fuel. He and his passengers, including three members of the film crew and Soviet journalist Alexei Grinevich, wound up stranded in Greenland until Tuesday.

After finally getting repairs and fuel, Wiesner turned around and headed for home, having fallen too far behind Tony to catch up.

Grinevich and the film crew members finally got seats on a commercial flight to Copenhagen, after remaining on a standby waiting list since Saturday for the only daily flight out. Wiesner paid for their tickets, saying he felt obliged to uphold his deal with Aliengena to ferry the film crew to Europe.

Later, both Allyn and Aliengena expressed sympathy and regret for what had happened to Wiesner.

“For him, it was the right decision,” Aliengena said of Wiesner’s turning back. “I probably wouldn’t have done that. But a pilot has to know his flying ability, and he’s got to be comfortable flying with that.”