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8/14/2019 Hana Hou: The Magazine of Hawaiian Airlines
that offers the only level bit of land along the rugged coast.
We race down a side road to the tiny village at the peninsula’s
tip just in time to see Armando come in low. He barely clears
some telephone lines along the outfield of a small baseball
diamond, then drops straight down to the turf and rolls to a stop
at home plate maybe 50 yards away.
It’s a stone-cold crazy landing that has us yelling at the top
of our lungs first with terror and then relief, and leaves the
rest of the people in the park—a few local families hanging
out on a Sunday afternoon and a couple of carloads of tourists
taking a detour from the long road to Häna—with jaws gaping
in shock.
A shirtless, ponytailed local man wanders up with his young
son to check out this thing that just dropped out of the sky
into his world. Naturally, Armando greets them with beaming
charm, enthralling the little boy hiding behind his dad’s leg
with a “Give me five, big guy.”
“You have a beautiful family,” he tells the man.
Then he pushes the Mosquito to the back end of the field,
with the town’s old stone church and a white cow looking on
incuriously as a backdrop. He fires up the motor and pulls
off a steep takeoff, just making it over a row of coconut palms
along the shoreline and soaring over the heads of a cluster
of tourists frantically snapping pictures.
We catch up to him next at Häna’s sleepy airstrip, where
he’s already chatting with a local mom and her four kids.
A couple of guys in shorts and slippers—no shirts—amble
over from a tent hangar near the snack bar-size terminal. It
turns out they fly their own ultralights here, so friendly if
vaguely competitive shop-talk ensues. One of them is a Dutch
guy named—get this—Armand. He cautions Armando that
since Häna is a “very isolated, noise-sensitive community,” to be
careful about flying too close to houses.
“Avoid populated areas,” Armando says. “Got it.”
A glider pilot named Bill walks over, and Armando shows
him some of the Mosquito’s fine points.
“You know, the great thing about being a pilot is that it’s
like a big family wherever you go,” Bill says. “I once flew
across the country, and everywhere I stopped, pilots would
give you a bed for the night, keys to a car and directions to the
best restaurant in town.”
“Exactly,” Armando says. “I saw the same thing on my trip
to Venezuela. We pilots always help one to the other.”
The next morning, we make a pilgrimage of sorts. In
Kïpahulu, just a few miles down the twisting jungle road from
Häna, lies the grave of the great transatlantic flier Charles
Lindbergh. Lindbergh had a home in Kïpahulu that he loved,
and in 1974, wracked with cancer, he asked to be flown there
from a hospital in New York t o spend his last days amid nature
with his family. By his own request, the iconic aviator had a
simple country funeral and was buried at a little church on a cliff
overlooking the ocean in the lush East Maui forest.
The grave itself is a platform of small stones with an
engraved tablet in the center. The cryptic inscription reads, “If
I can catch the wind of the morning and dwell in the uttermost
part of the sea.”
Armando stands quietly for a long time contemplating the
grave and the inscription. “Charles Lindbergh,” he says finally.
“I guess he was a big man.”
We walk to a clearing at the cliff’s edge. In the distance,
across the expanse of frothing whitecaps and racing clouds,
lies the faint outline of the Big Island’s northern tip. There, a
windswept little airstrip at ‘Upolu Point will be Armando’s
landfall on the last island in his joyride down the archipelago.
Sergio points: “That’s where you’re gonna be flying, man.”
Armando shades his eyes with his hand and gazes out.
“Looks windy,” he says. “Just how we like it.”
The next day, Armando heads across the channel with
Sergio pulling ground support duty. Meanwhile, I have to catch
a boring old commercial flight back to my terrestrial life in
Honolulu. There’s no way of knowing it, but our parting is to
be the last time I ever see Sergio. Just a couple of months later
we lost him in an accident while he was freediving— something
he dearly loved.
While I’m waiting for my flight, they call me from the
airstrip at ‘Upolu to shout over the wind that Armando has made
it. “Derek, my berry good friend,” Armando gushes, “my little
Mosquito has brought me to the Big Island, and we really like
it! I think she wants me to stay here with her for a while!”
Later, reclining in the pressurized cabin as the steel bird
blazes across the miles toward O‘ahu, I can’t escape the feeling
that this is somehow cheating. I’m in the air, but I can’t feel the
spirit of the sky.
My chest feels funny, and I realize with a jolt that it’s
heartache. Just a few hours apart, and already I’m pining for the
sweet bite of Armando’s little … of our little Mosquito. HHCatching the Mosquito Armando loves to take adventurous passengers flying inhis little Mosquito. You can reach him at (808) 388-1765or [email protected].
You can also watch a video slide show that Sergio madeof Armando’s interisland exploits by searching for “Flightof the Mosquito” on YouTube.
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GPS? Check. Walkie-talkie? Check. iPod? Check. Mystical light show beckoning on the horizon? Roger that. As Armando would
say (a dozen times a day): “We’re good to go ... cannot get any better than this!”