|
Profile: Al Santilli
Al acknowledges that glider flying is more of a challenge than power flying, but he argues that it's less risky. To be sure, he had to bail out of a glider once, but in his scale of scares, that doesn't measure up to the time he unknowingly flew a Piper Cub Special with a broken engine from Hobbs, New Mexico to Albuquerque. That was in the fall of 1947, when he was 33. He was in the Army at the time, based in Albuquerque, and he was flying both gliders and power planes in his spare time. Like most pilots, he looked for excuses to fly, and one weekend decided to use a PA-11 (aka Piper Cub Special) that he and three other men owned to visit a soaring friend in Hobbs, three hundred miles away. With its beefy 90-horsepower engine, the PA-11 cruised at 100 mph, a big step up from the original Cub. On the way south to Hobbs on Saturday, Al probably fueled up at Roswell. On the way back the next day, because of deteriorating weather and the limited amount of daylight still left, he bypassed Roswell, flying nonstop to Albuquerque. He tied down the plane and went home. |
l Santilli doesn't like power planes. He is afraid of them. They have engines that can quit. He prefers gliders, and has spent 6,000 happy hours in them.
H Bar Press
729 Westview St., Philadelphia PA 19119
Phone: 215-844-8054, Fax: 215-844-1399, ken @ hbarpress.com