AOPA Pilot Magazine - March 2011 - 78

Returning home, Gannon joined a flying club, taking trips into Mexico, and San Francisco, and to the Grand Canyon. Planning Gannon says that the key to making international flying a smooth operation is to read up on countries’ entry requirements, assemble your paperwork well in advance, and e-mail copies of key documents to yourself— pilot certificate, medical certificates, and insurance—so that you can access them from almost anywhere. Have contact information for your destination nation readily available. He even suggests bringing some carbon paper along—in India, officials needed nine copies of a document. Be patient with the process. It could take hours after you arrive at the airport before you are processed and granted permission to depart. In Mumbai, India, it took from 6 a.m. until noon. Gannon didn’t let that kind of headache spoil the adventure. “If you truly want to see the world, then get over your ideas and prejudices, and be happy with the process,” he said. Gannon’s many letters about the legs of his trip can be seen on the Earthround-

ers website (www. earthrounders.com), and he will host the group’s 2012 reunion in Florida. “The people of the world love the people of the world,” Gannon said. “They just treated me super.” And the pilots? “I cannot say enough about the pilots around the world; the help they would offer me and the suggestions,” Gannon said. One of Gannon’s bigger challenges today is boiling down a talk to a local flying club about his adventure to one hour (including a 15-minute question period). You may never plan to participate, as Gannon did, in the Harry Redford Cattle Drive through the Australian Outback, fuel your aircraft from a 55-gallon drum mounted on a camel cart (Timbuktu), or hang out with the pilots in an Iranian flying club based at the airport you visit. Still, Gannon hopes you’ll find inspiration in this message on his World Flying Adventure website (www.worldflyingadventure.com): “Hopefully, this site will aid other pilots and adventurers alike with places

Gannon in Palmyra, Syria (top), and Basra, Iraq (above).

to go and things to do. And possibly it will encourage you to get at your own adventure. Life is a short flight. If you can do it, do it now!” Dan Namowitz is a freelance writer, CFI, and commercial pilot living in Maine.

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AOPA Pilot Magazine - March 2011

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