Crossing the Atlantic at age 89, with Ed Galkin

So let's talk about the mental game here because if you're over the Pacific for 14 hours or you're between the Azores and Newfoundland, how do you stay alert and engaged but without obsessing over every blip in the oil pressure gauge? Do you have some habits or rules of thumbs that keep your mind in balance on those long legs?

Not really.

You know, I'm just paying attention to all my instruments.

We have a flight plan on file where every hour we're giving a position report on our HF radio.

And I've been flying over seven, I guess, 7,500 hours now.

And the adrenaline gets up a little bit, but it's like driving on my car.

It's not really a major event.

The way I really got involved with long-distance flying back in the early 80s, we flew my family and my children up to Alaska.

And we spent a couple of weeks in Alaska.

And then the following year, I said to my wife, you know, flying to Alaska was great.

This was back in the early 80s, 83, 84.

So then I convinced her at around 1985 to fly the Atlantic.

So my first ocean crossing was the Atlantic back in 85.

And we did go the northern route.

through Goose Bay, Labrador, through Greenland, through Iceland, Reykjavik, and then we wound up in Scotland.

And the trip worked out, like, fabulously well.

My family liked it.

We all liked it.

And then I decided, since I did the Atlantic Ocean back in 86, you know, how about doing the Pacific in...

So that's how my first trip over the Pacific was back in 88.

And then a year later, I decided I flew halfway around the world.

Why not go all the way around the world? So my first trip around the world was 1989.

What's interesting, back in the early 80s, things have changed so dramatically.

They still had ships out in the Atlantic Ocean every couple of hundred miles that you could get to with an ADF radio.

My first trip over the Pacific, we didn't have...