I took up flying late in life. I got my Private Pilot Certificate in April, 1998, after training at Lane Community College at the Eugene, OR, airport (KEUG). I bought my first plane that December, a 1979 Piper Archer II (N3048T). For the first few years I just made local flights around the Pacific Northwest.
In 2002 I moved to Bainbridge Island, WA, and moved N3048T to the Bremerton Airport (KPWT). At the Bremerton Airport I began training for my instrument rating that winter, completing my check ride in April, 2003. Learning instrument flying in the cold, wet, cloudy conditions of a Pacific Northwest winter was definitely the right thing to do – real IFR conditions – much better than learning under the hood in always sunny skies, or worse yet, in the totally artificial environment of a simulator.
With my Instrument rating in hand, I began planning some far-ranging flying missions. The most significant took place in the summer of 2004 when I flew to the airports (with hard surfaced runways) that are the farthest north, south, east and west in the continental US. The northernmost is Piney-Pinecreek in Minnesota, 48Y, where the northern half of the runway is actually in Canada. Easternmost is Eastport, Maine, KEPM. Southernmost is Key West, KEYW, a place where I’ve landed many times since that first flight. Westernmost is Quillayute, Washington, KUIL, not far from my home base at KPWT. While in Florida I also flew out to Eleuthera Island in the Bahamas, MYEM, my first foreign country.
In 2005 I decided to join a fly-out called the Cayman Caravan (no longer around) which organized a group of planes to fly from Key West to the Cayman Islands, a flight route that took us right over Cuba. In planning the flight back to Florida to join the Caravan I realized that during the 2004 “4 corners” flight I had landed in over half the states. On my way to Key West and back, I decided to land in all the states I had missed the year before. It took a lot of zigzagging north and south to airports across the country but I managed to get to them all. Later that same summer I flew N3048T to Ketchikan, Alaska, (the 49th state), landing in three places in Canada along the way. By the end of that year I had added the Cayman islands and Canada as countries where I’d landed.
In the following years I went on to get my Commercial Single-Engine Rating, Commercial Multi-Engine Rating, and Private Single-Engine Seaplane Rating.
At some point I had a conversation with a guy who wasn’t a pilot but talked about his father flying his small plane, a Bonanza, to Europe and back. Really? I had no idea that was even possible so I started investigating. I learned that it was indeed feasible, and commonly done. I also found the Earthrounders website ( http://www.earthrounders.com ) which is a registry of people who have flown small planes around the world! Given my decades-long history of international travel, I decided international flying could be my niche in aviation. But I needed a plane that was better-suited to such long-distance flying so in 2010 I bought a 2001 Lancair Columbia 300, N788W, with only 288 hours total time on the airframe and engine, and sold N3048T. I upgraded the avionics and launched my first round-the-world flight in June, 2011. Those flights and the flights that followed are described in my 2015 book “Flying 7 Continents Solo”. Upon landing on King George Island in Antarctica, SCRM, I became only the 5th person to fly solo in a single-engine plane to all 7 continents. More information about this book can be found in the “Published Books” section of this website.
In 2018 I flew over the North Pole, from Resolute Bay (CYRB) in Canada to Longyearbyen, Svalbard Islands, Norway (ENSB), a flight I always wanted to do since I became a pilot. Photos and descriptions from that flight are shown in the “Solo Flight over the North Pole” in the video section of this website.
In 2019 I flew around the world for a second time, westward instead of eastward, flying through Russia, Japan, China, and Kazakhstan. I’ve received two FAI diplomas (Federation Aeronautique Internationale based in Switzerland) for my circumnavigations.
I’ve now done all the long distance international fights I wanted to do I’m satisfied with what I’ve accomplished in that regard. From now on my flights will be “local”; i.e., confined to North America and Caribbean. Instead, my new travel adventures will be on a sailboat. See the ‘Sailing” section of this website for more information.