After a decade aloft, pilot is ready for a landing
By Robert J. Hawkins (signonsandiego.com)Robert Gannon turned 60 in September, and he thinks it is time to come home and settle down.
So on Jan. 8 at noon, Gannon will land his 42-year-old Cessna 182, Lucky Lady Too, at Gillespie Field in El Cajon to complete an incredible 10-year odyssey that has taken them to 155 countries and all 50 states.
Gannon has landed Lucky Lady Too in 1,200 places, from open fields to hard-packed red dirt strips to sophisticated runways. He’s circled the globe twice — once in each direction — and flown over the North Pole, rarely staying more than two nights at any one place.
This will be the first time Lucky Lady Too and Gannon have flown back to San Diego together.
It hasn’t been one continuous journey. In the years since he and Lucky Lady Too took off from Gillespie in October 2000, Gannon has parked her in 40 different countries around the world and returned home to take care of business and chart the next leg of his journey.
“I probably have the biggest collection of ‘Lonely Planet’ books in the world,” Gannon said in a telephone interview from San Miguel de Allende, an artsy, colonial-era city in central Mexico where he has been staying for more than a week.
Where is home? That’s a question Gannon is grappling with right now.
Home started out on a farm in central Iowa with his 13 brothers and sisters. He graduated from the University of Iowa with a degree in agriculture, went to Vietnam as a helicopter-borne medic, started a successful Midwest construction business, sold it, moved to La Jolla and gradually moved up the coast, to Del Mar, then Cardiff-by-the-Sea.
During his travels, Gannon said he found it practical for tax reasons to move his residence to Las Vegas in 2005, although that never was nor ever will be home in his mind. “I take my risks in flying,” he says with a chuckle.
It was in San Diego that Gannon first learned to fly and it is here, if anywhere, that he might settle down again.
“When people ask me where home is, I tend to say San Diego,” he said. “Of all the places that I’ve been, that’s the nicest place in America.”
Gannon’s global journey — and his love for flying — really began in 1992 with flying lessons at Montgomery Field. In two months’ time, he had a pilot’s license, and a month later he was certified for instrument landings.
Days later, he took off for Paris in a secondhand Cherokee airplane dubbed Lucky Lady, for a reunion of his Harvard business seminars class.
He had a vague idea of traveling the globe with a motorcycle aboard the plane, and he managed pretty well for four months — hitting 75 places in 20 countries — until he crashed at the Nairobi Wilson Airport in Kenya.
Gannon returned to San Diego and joined a flying club out of Montgomery Field. His business acumen and wise investments helped give him the freedom for his next move. Just over a decade ago, he met Lucky Lady Too, and fell in love with his rekindled dream to span the globe.
”I was approaching my 50th birthday and wanted one big adventure before settling down,” he recalls.
His travels might be more easily summarized by the places he hasn’t gone — like most of the Central Asian nations, China, and about a third of the African nations. If he didn’t land in a country, it usually had to do with bureaucracy or bribery, neither of which he cared to abide. Flying into Iraq in 2009 was a bureaucratic challenge he felt worth tackling. “I did it by turning my trip into a medical mission,” Gannon said. In Venezuela, a general tried to confiscate his plane.
There were challenging moments. Charting courses between mountains, like the Andes and Rockies, rather than over them, is an example. Filling the cabin with a spare fuel tank, so that he could make the 18-hour flight to Hawaii from Oakland, is another. He has sometimes been forced to fly around storms, leaving him with a spoonful of gas upon landing, as on the flight from West Africa to Brazil, which ended up taking 17½ hours.
He lost his alternator north of Bangkok and landed with a dead battery in Laos. That’s where growing up on a farm with its “make do” ethos came in handy. Gannon says he went out and bought the biggest truck battery he could find and strung it to the Cessna’s with jumper cables. Once charged, they gave him 90 minutes of flying time before he’d have to land and recharge.
Gannon calls himself a “flying backpacker” and his plane “my three-quarter-ton pickup truck with wings.” It can burn ordinary gasoline, something that helped him in the Solomon Islands and Timbuktu.
As for the pilot, Gannon said he’s more lucky than good. “The great ones would never attempt some of the stuff I’ve tried,” he said. “They know better. I didn’t know I couldn’t do things.”
Combined with this fortuitous brand of naiveté, Gannon said his intense curiosity, a deep sense of wonder, keeps him on the move.
“I allowed my curiosity to rule,” he said. “Curiosity never hurt me. When you come to a closed door, knock on the door. More often than not, people say, ‘Welcome. Nobody ever comes here.’ ”
Then again, it’s not as if Gannon is fearless. “Marriage is risky to me,” he said with a laugh. “People ask me how I can afford to do this and I say I never married. I never had children.”
But now, with his adventure nearly at an end, Bob Gannon confesses to a sense of melancholy.
“It’s time to start giving back,” he said. He loves San Diego. And he’s quite taken with the expatriate community in San Miguel, which he finds filled with “interested and interesting people who give back to their city.”
He may write a book about his adventures. He’s kept logs and journals and a sporadic blog.
“I notice that I’ve really slowed down, not moving as fast as I used to,” he says. But he admits that he’s “attached to the stimulation of flying. I’ve got to wean myself off that.”
That’s the next door on which Bob Gannon will be knocking. And he’s as curious as anyone to see what is behind it.
Flying aroundThe travels (most of them) of Robert Gannon aboard Lucky Lady Too:
2000Kiribati, French Polynesia, Cook Islands, Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, Norfolk Island, New Zealand
2001New Zealand, Australia (landed in 125 different places in Australia)
2003Australia, New Caledonia, Vanuatu, Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, Micronesia, Palau, Malaysia, Thailand
2004Thailand, Laos, Viet Nam , Cambodia, Myanmar, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Maldives , Seychelles, Kenya
2005Kenya, Uganda, Sudan, Tanzania, Mayotte, Mozambique, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Zambia, Botswana
2006South Africa, Swaziland, Lesotho, Namibia, Botswana, Angola, Gabon Sao Tome, Togo Ghana, Burkina Faso, Mali, Senegal, Cape Verde, Brazil
2007Brazil, Argentina, Antarctica, Chile, Falkland Islands, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru Ecuador, French Guiana, Suriname, Guyana, Venezuela, Colombia, Panama
2008Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Belize, Mexico, USA, Alaska, Canada, over the North Pole to Svalbard, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Germany, Czech Republic, Ukraine, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro, Albania, Macedonia, Kosovo, Bulgaria, Romania, Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain
2009United Arab Emirates, Oman, Qatar, Iran, Kuwait, Iraq, Jordan, Syrian Arab Republic, Cyprus, Israel, Greece, Malta, Tunisia, Morocco, Gibraltar, Spain, Italy, Austria, Turkey, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Russia, Alaska, USA, Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Faroe Islands, Ireland, Isle of Man, England, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, Canada and back into the USA with stops in the following US states: Maine, Mass., NH, VT, Conn., NJ, RI, DE, Wash. DC, Maryland, Virginia, NC, SC, Georgia, Florida before continuing to the Bahamas, Turks and Caicos.
2010Dominican Republic, US Virgin Islands, British Virgin Islands, Anguilla, St. Maarten, St. Martin, Saint Bart’s, Saba, St. Kitts and Nevis, Saint Eustatius, Antigua, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Dominica, Saint Lucia, Barbados, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago, Curacao, Bonaire, Aruba, Colombia, Cayman Islands, Jamaica, over Cuba and back into the Bahamas and back into the USA with stops in the states of Florida, Georgia, Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota, South and North Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada
Robert Gannon with his Cessna 182, Lucky Lady Too, which he has used to travel around
the world for the past 10 years. Gannon has landed Lucky Lady Too in 1,200 places.
Pilot Robert Gannon's personal map of his global jaunts during the past 10 years.
Robert Gannon in Timbuktu.
