"What color is your airplane?” the Brazilian radio controller asked.
At first I thought she was taking a personal interest in me. Then I realized she was asking the color of my coffin.
Robert “Bob” Gannon had used more than half his fuel flying around, under, and through seven storms in the Intertropical Convergence Zone, where the trade winds of the Northern and Southern Hemispheres meet, and he was not yet halfway through his 15-hour flight from the Cape Verde Islands to Natal, Brazil. It was September 26, 2006. He remembered reading about the 2009 disaster in this treacherous region. Air France 447, flying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, had encountered turbulence and icing conditions. According to the final accident report, the pitot tubes, which measure air velocity, became obstructed by ice and gave the pilots inconsistent readings of airspeed. Ensuing pilot errors caused the plane to crash belly-first into the Atlantic Ocean at 175 miles per hour, killing all 228 passengers and crew.
That was a technologically advanced Airbus 330. Gannon’s airplane was a 1968, single-engine Cessna 182 that seated four and lacked anti-icing equipment. He hadn’t learned how to fly until he was 42 years old. After four months in the cockpit, he’d totaled his first single-engine airplane, a Piper Cherokee Six ironically named Lucky Lady, outside of Wilson Airport in Nairobi, Kenya, but walked away without a scratch.
Eight years later, in 2000, Gannon had bought the used Cessna in California and named it Lucky Lady Too (not Two) in honor of the plane he’d crashed. In it, he would eventually set world aviation records and assist humanitarian relief efforts around the globe before finally settling in Henderson. He would fly around the world two and a half times — without autopilot — in Lucky Lady Too. It would take him over the North Pole and down to Antarctica, to 155 countries, all the continents, and all 50 U.S. states in a span of 10 years and three months.
But for now, he stared at the needle on the fuel gauge. Fear was keeping him awake. His mantra, “I’d rather be lucky than smart,” was losing its sheen.
Gannon was raised on a farm outside of Mingo, Iowa, about 30 miles northeast of Des Moines. He was one of 14 children; regardless of gender, all baled hay, shoveled manure, drove tractors, cooked, and washed dishes. According to Gannon’s friend of 50 years, Cork Peterson, the local school board offered the Gannon kids their own school bus. After all, there were only 19 in their high school graduating class. Gannon attended Iowa State University in 1969 and then volunteered for the draft as a medic.
“I thought it would be easier on my head to help instead of kill,” he says. “Ernest Hemingway was a medic, and it resonated with me.” Two of his brothers had already been injured by shrapnel or sniper bullets in Vietnam, but he was counting on the GI Bill to help defray college expenses when he returned home.
Gannon first served in an ambulance unit in Vietnam and then volunteered for Medevac helicopters to put himself, literally, in the line of fire. He was armed with an M16 rifle, which he never used, and a pocket pistol, meant only to take himself out rather than be captured as a POW.
He was trained by J. Richard Claywell in the 236th Medical Detachment out of Da Nang, nicknamed Da Nang Dustoff. Although based in Da Nang, the unit’s missions stretched all the way to the demilitarized zone and Laos, and went around the clock.
“Like most medics, Bob had the desire to help people,” Claywell says. “On every mission, you didn’t know if you were going to come back alive or not.” There was a one-in-three chance of being killed or wounded on a Dustoff mission. Each unescorted “Huey” helicopter responding to a call had a pilot, copilot, crew chief, and one medic. Under fire from the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army, “Farmer Bob” (as Gannon was known) and other medics stopped bleeding in chest wounds and severed limbs and gave mouth-to-mouth resuscitation until the Huey arrived at a hospital. If the helicopter couldn’t land, it would go into a stationary hover while a cable was lowered to hoist up the injured — under enemy fire — even if the injured was also the enemy.
Most casualties were caused by land mines. Gannon says he rescued seven Marines from a rice paddy, two of them already gone. On another occasion, he saved a soldier who’d lost both legs and an arm. There had been only five days left in the wounded soldier’s tour of duty.
From 1962 to 1972, Claywell says, 496,572 missions evacuated 900,000 casualties across Vietnam. As of May, there was a bipartisan bill before Congress to award the Congressional Gold Medal to all Dustoff crewmembers for their distinguished achievements and contributions.
Back in Lucky Lady Too above the South Atlantic, Gannon’s eyes again fixed on the needle of the fuel gauge as grim thoughts reverberated around the dark cabin, the instrument gauges the only light piercing the night.
Am I going to hit another storm? Are the winds going to change? Should I tell control I might not make it? Today may not be a good day.
He couldn’t help but recall the ordeal of two pilots just the week earlier who’d been flying their single-engine plane at 10,000 feet through the Intertropical Convergence Zone. They’d hit a huge cumulus cloud that pulled them up to 20,000 feet, requiring supplemental oxygen, before expelling them again.
Gannon’s tour of duty ended in the fall of 1971, and he headed back to Mingo to help on the farm until going back to Iowa State and enrolling in an agriculture business program. He studied through the summers, and on graduation day in 1974 he was hired to construct a hog confinement unit for the university. The demand for more such units swelled until he eventually formed and then sold his own construction company. For the next five years, he held a seat on the Chicago Board of Trade, where he dealt in agricultural commodities, mostly grain.
After 1984, Gannon returned to private business and established another construction company, working primarily at military bases. Seven years later he sold that business and moved to San Diego, and in 1988 he was accepted into the Owner/President Management (OPM) program at Harvard Business School, which was taught three weeks a year over the course of three years. He became a partner in a small wood-manufacturing business in San Diego.
After Vietnam, Gannon had wanted to see more of the world. “He’s the most adventuresome guy I ever met,” longtime friend Peterson says. Gannon’s seasickness tendency ruled out boat travel, so he learned to fly instead. It took him two months to get a visual flying license and, in another month, his instrument license. In 1992 he bought the Piper Cherokee Six from Peterson and flew it to an OPM reunion in Paris, but he had a bigger goal in his sights: a flight around the world. It wasn’t long after that Lucky Lady crashed outside Nairobi, losing its wings and landing gear. Cause? Pilot error — trying to take off on a short runway in a hot and humid atmosphere with a heavy load at a high elevation, the so-called “4 Hs” that pilots are taught to avoid.
Eight years passed as Gannon dreamed about continuing his round-the-world flight. In 2000, he finally overcame inertia and bought the 1968 Cessna 182. To extend the plane’s flying time, he removed three of the seats and installed a 125-gallon storage tank in the rear with a hand pump to move fuel from the tank to the left wing. That gave him enough fuel capacity to fly 18 hours nonstop on the first “leg” of the flight: from Oakland, California, to Kona, Hawaii. Over the next 10 years, he continued the journey, dividing his global circumnavigation into 41 legs of one to two months each, between which he would park Lucky Lady Too and fly home commercially to manage his business.
He was on the 19th leg when he found himself in the Intertropical Convergence Zone, less than halfway to his goal of Natal, Brazil, and short on fuel. To counter the rhythmic noise of the engine that threatened to lull him to sleep, he turned his thoughts to the children he’d been able to help over the years.
Gannon’s humanitarian bent — the underlying motivation for his medic service in Vietnam — bubbled to the surface as he got older. With no kids of his own, he channeled his nurturing impulses into humanitarian missions helping children in the places where he flew. In Basra, Iraq, where childhood leukemia is especially common, he presented a check for $10,000 from a contractor’s association in Iowa and delivered nine boxes of toys to the Children’s Hospital. He also assisted the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in building operating rooms at a local hospital. He made balloon animals for kids in Namibia and flew relief shipments of cracked corn and split peas into South Sudan, which, since 2014, has suffered successive droughts, food crises, and mass starvation events. He donated to the construction of a school for some of the 800,000 children orphaned by AIDS in Uganda. In August 2007 in Pisco, Peru, following an 8-magnitude earthquake and subsequent tsunami, which killed over 500 people and injured more than 1,300, he flew three shipments of clean drinking water to residents he described as “half-crazed” with thirst.
His eyes returned to the fuel gauge and his mind to the implicit question of the Brazilian radio controller. “What color is your coffin?”
There’s no tail wind. I don’t have enough fuel to make it back to the Cape Verde Islands through all those storms. What about that military airport on the island of Fernando de Noronha?
The island is not a port of entry for Brazil with customs and immigration officials, and so Gannon could not land there except in the event of an emergency according to aviation rules. About 450 miles from Natal, Gannon finally declared that emergency.
He arrived in the dark and mountainous terrain and loaded two jerry cans holding 10 gallons each. The accommodating airport staff directed him to a small motel to spend the night before he departed the next morning for Natal.
Following that fateful 19th leg, Gannon would go on to complete the remaining 22 needed to complete his first of two full trips around the world — he made it halfway a third time. As a world traveler, he has a particularly well-informed view of humanity.
Gannon has been robbed only twice: once in a hotel room in Panama while he slept, and once when he left a backpack with his money and passport in a tuk-tuk (three-wheeled open transport vehicle) on the way to a restaurant in Sri Lanka. The driver returned the backpack and promptly left. Gannon’s passport was still there, but the money was gone. Police later located the thief … and the cash.
More sinister than either of those minor incidents was an attempt by one of Hugo Chávez’s three-star generals to steal Gannon’s plane in 2010. He’d flown from the Leeward Antilles to Isla de Margarita just north of mainland Venezuela. The general saw the large fuel tank in the back of the cabin and asked if he had a permit for it, suggesting the whole rig was subject to confiscation for being out of compliance with international flight rules.
“Yes, I do,” Gannon replied.
“Show it to me,” the general demanded.
“It’s back home in America.”
The airport manager intervened and asked if the tank was hooked into the fuel system.
“No.” Gannon had disconnected the hose from the hand pump before landing.
The manager turned to the general and explained that, because the tank was not connected to the fuel line, it was simply considered baggage. He allowed the plane to leave as the general fumed.
Beyond that, Gannon never experienced anything that caused him fear or animosity. Regardless of where he landed around the world, he was welcomed. He didn’t encounter anti-American sentiment, even in the Middle East. Though not a Muslim, he was allowed to say prayers in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He gained the trust of people from cultures very different from his own, opening his eyes to the world’s wondrous diversity.
“Iranians knew I was American, and they were nothing but nice to me,” he says, adding that it’s frowned upon to say anything disparaging about Americans in the mostly Muslim nation of Kosovo because NATO supported it in its war for independence from Yugoslavia in 1998-99. He found Buddhist countries to be the most compassionate.
Gannon’s broad view of humanity has also affected his perspective on his homeland — particularly the recent political divisiveness and rancor.
“Of all 155 countries I’ve visited, the angriest people I ever met are right here,” he says. Still, adds the man who can fly wherever he wants, “I would never live anywhere else.”