hana hou: the magazine of hawaiian airlines

8/14/2019 Hana Hou: The Magazine of Hawaiian Airlines

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48

I’ve known Armando for only a few minutes, and already

he’s calling me his “berry good friend.” He has me wriggle

into an olive-drab flight suit that matches his own and pats me

down. It’s a precaution, he says, against a cell phone, keys

or anything else drifting out of a pocket and getting sucked

back into the Mosquito’s prop, which at 5,000 rpm could prove

a fatal screw-up.

I gather that your average ultralight pilot would have a hard

time just keeping the souped-up, small-winged Mosquito—

a customized version of a GibboGear Manta model—in the air.

But Armando is hardly your average ultralight pilot; he once

set records and made headlines by island-hopping 3,000 miles

across the Caribbean from his adoptive Florida to his native

Venezuela in “nineteen beautiful days.”

Nowadays he spends a lot of time in Hawai‘i, where his son,

Nacho, is stationed in the Air Force, and he’s come up with

another island-hopping mission: to become the first person

anyone can think of to fly the whole length of the main Hawaiianchain in an ultralight. (OK, there were these two zany brothers

from Florida calling themselves “The Wrong Brothers” who

created a big media splash in 1980 by flying straight from

the Big Island to O‘ahu—but that was diffe

Kaua‘i.) Anyway, it’s all part of Armando

eventually fly the Mosquito around all fifty st

Through a mutual friend, Brazilian-bo

Sergio Goes, I’ve been recruited to tag along

part passenger and part ground crew. Sergio a

frogging in and out of airports and rental cars

of the archipelago, chasing the Mosquito w

the carefully measured gas-and-oil mixture A

power the little two-stroke motor.

When I meet up with him at Dillingham, h

north from O‘ahu to Kaua‘i and back; now he

He and Sergio huddle in the Mosquito’s sma

through ragged maps and scraps of paper,

to plot out the trip. When I ask nervously wh

be a bit late in the game to be figuring out a f

lifts his head and deadpans, “Relax, there’s

about. You’re in the hands of South American

A few minutes later, I’m squeezing in

minuscule back seat to ride along on the ne

The first time I meet Armando Martinez, he’s picking up his airplan

literally lifting up the nose of the hang glider-like ultralight, which h

calls “my little Mosquito,” and hauling it out of its hangar at Dilling

a serene little airstrip on a remote stretch of O‘ahu’s North Shore.

Going through his preflight check, it’s obvious that Armando’s st

affair with his little Mosquito is the stuff of telenovelas . He adoring

his eyes over her every surface: the golden fabric of her wing, her sv

fuselage, her perky little motor, the curves of the twin propeller at h

He makes it clear from the get-go that he is ready to lay down

her. “I have to tell you, people have been hurt flying the ultralig

have died,” he says earnestly in his peculiar accent—think Desi Ar

Sylvester the Cat. “I believe it is very safe. But if God is calling fo

I can be in the safest place in world, and still I go to Him.”

So much for “Welcome aboard.”

All systems go: Our man in the sky Derek Ferrar (back seat) with ultralight pilot extraordinaire Armando Martinez. Martinez

opening spread, flying with his son Nacho off Ka‘ena Point, O‘ahu) has already island-hopped his “Mosquito” from Venezue

Florida; now he’s hoping to become the first ultralight pilot to fly the main Hawaiian Island chain, from Kaua‘i to the Big Is

STORY BY DEREK FERRAR PHOTOS BY SERGIO GOES



clear across the island to Sandy Beach. Armando makes sure

I’m strapped in tight, then fits me with a bulky headset so we

can talk to each other over the rush of the wind and piercing

buzz of the engine.

He leans over me to pull-start the Mosquito like a lawn

mower. After a couple of tugs, the motor hacks to life, and

Armando jumps in the front seat. As we taxi, I’m struck again

by how little there is to this thing. His back is between my

legs, and my feet rest on pegs outside the fiberglass cowling like

I’m a Backseat Betty on a Harley run.

Armando’s got the Mosquito stripped down to a minimum

weight of about 300 pounds. A hand-held GPS serves as the

instrument panel, and a walkie-talkie is our radio. There’s no

fuel gauge; he checks the level by leaning out of the trike in

midflight to eyeball a translucent strip in the fiberglass gas

tank. The one luxury item is an iPod velcroed to the dashboard

which pumps Armando’s collection of classic rock tunes through

our headphones. As we roll out onto the tarmac for takeoff,

Kansas’ “Dust in the Wind” is blasting. I am not comforted.

We pick up speed for a few yards, and then—poof!—we’re

suddenly off the ground. At first I grip the sides of the trike

with white knuckles, overcome by the feeling that I’m just

going to tumble out into midair, especially when Armando

banks a series of steep turns to catch an updraft off the

cliff face. But gradually I relax into the powerlessness of the

passenger, surrendering to Armando’s flying mastery, come

what may.

The Mosquito skews side to side disconcertingly, but

Armando has it under control. He tells me later that once you

master the art of surfing the air currents, it just becomes a

matter of trimming the steering bar with small nudges. Just like

surfers can feel the movement and spirit of the living ocean, he

says, “in the Mosquito, you really feel the spirit of the sky.”

We fly out over the ocean, where he points out a whale

breaching and kite surfers racing along the shore. I don’t realize

how high we’ve risen until I see how tiny their fluttering airfoils

look below us. Although it’s barely past dawn, a strong head

wind is already cranking against us. We seem to crawl along,

with the groundspeed display on the little GPS unit barely

registering 30 miles an hour. (With no wind, Armando tells me,

the Mosquito will average around 75.)

Beneath us, the farms of Mokulë‘ia roll by, and from this

vantage point I see hidden estates and secret ravines I never

knew were there. We follow the artery of the highway up over

O‘ahu’s central plateau, with the military bases and housing

developments forming circuit-board patterns below.

Halfway across the island, Armando cuts east toward the

Ko‘olau mountain ridge. Soon the fingers of steep, folded rock

sweep up toward us alarmingly. Ahead, a gap in the ridge-line

scrapes the bottom of a roiling cloud bank, with the taller

peaks on either side lost in mist. My teeth are chattering, and

it’s only partly because of the biting cold wind at 4,000 feet.

Armando aims to squeeze through the slim gap between

rock and cloud. Too high, and we’ll be flying blind in the

unpredictable cloud drafts. Too low, and, well …

“Hang on,” he warns over the headset. “It’s going to

get bumpy.”

Understatement. As we approach the ridge, blasts of wind

slam us around, and the Mosquito bucks and rolls as Armando

surfs the sky, grunting as he muscles the wing around. A wall of

cloud streams up over the ridge and rolls abruptly down toward

us like a breaking wave. We’re almost enveloped until Armando

pulls a quick dive under it.

Suddenly the ridge is maybe 100 feet below us, looking way

too close for comfort. Just as quickly, it drops away on the

other side, and we’re through. The expanse of O‘ahu’s Wind-

ward side opens up ahead: rooftops, golf courses and the broad

sweep of Käne‘ohe Bay dotted with ivory sandbanks.

We head south, with the cold crosswind now driving us

along at a much faster clip. Almost before I realize it, we’re

approaching the island’s rocky southeast corner, and the air

begins to warm as we descend. We cross out over the water

next to the ashy cone of Koko Crater, and Armando drops the

Mosquito suddenly into a steep downward spiral.

“It’s no good to fly low for a long a time in this wind,”

he tosses back through the headset. “Better to just go for it!”

For a moment, the arc of our turn sends us dead for the

crater slope, and I taste my heart in the back of my throat.

Then, in an instant, we wheel around and plop sharply onto the

broad lawn at Sandy Beach, a popular landing pad for the

hang gliders and other sky junkies who ride the updrafts

against the cliffs nearby.

As we swoop down, a lone figure waves us in like a traffic

cop. Armando rolls the Mosquito across the lawn to a bathroom

blockhouse at the far end, its walls painted with murals of

Hawaiian surf heroes.

The traffic cop comes trotting up. He’s Eddie Tadao, a

Vietnam vet helicopter pilot who now spends his days flying

an assortment of kites on the breezy lawn at Sandy’s, decked

out in an array of fanny packs, utility belts and a vest bejeweled

with a multitude of colored carabiner clips. He’s the one-man

air traffic tower of Sandy Beach, proudly calling the strip of

grass “my little airport.” Eddie used to fly ultralights and

paragliders himself, he tells us, until one day he came down

50

Photographer Sergio Goes (red flight suit) took advantage of the unique aerial perspectives to shoot the patterns and

geometries of Hawai‘i’s landscapes, often leaning precariously far out of the trike. “Hanging from wing in the trike, we are

like water sloshing in bucket,” Armando says, “and I am like a big hand holding bucket. My job is not to spill it.”



52 52

hard near the bathroom and busted himself up pretty good. He

shows us the scars where he broke his arm and pelvis, and

where they operated on his ruptured spleen. His wife divorced

him, he says, because he spent all his weekends flying.

With the wind as strong as it is, Armando thinks it’s wiser

to make the flight over the channel to Moloka‘i solo. And I’m

OK with that. Sergio drives up with a can of fuel, and Armando

quickly drains it into the Mosquito’s tank. He yanks the starter

and rolls to the far end of the lawn, then pops off into the

wind, with Eddie waving him on.

Meanwhile, Sergio and I hustle out to the real airport

to hop a commercial flight to Kaunakakai. Getting out of

the plane at Moloka‘i’s tiny airport, I catch a glimpse of the

Mosquito tied down on a corner of the tarmac, and my heart

skips a beat.

Armando meets us in the parking lot, where I overhear a

guy talking into his cell phone: “Yeah, it’s some kind goofy

plane—an ultralight or something. This guy just flew in on it.

He’s crazy!”

“Well, amigo,” Sergio tells Armando, “it looks like you’re

definitely the life of the party here today.”

Still raring to go after a day of flying, Armando takes me for

a spin over the cliffs of Moloka‘i’s north coast. We take off and

cruise low over country homesteads dotted with rusting pickups

and A-frame chicken shelters. Suddenly the land drops away,

and we’re high over the sea, the line of vertical cliffs stretching

ahead of us toward the lonely peninsula of Kalaupapa.

The wind roars against us, and needles of rain start to sting

our faces, so before long Armando banks back downwind to

the airport. Over the headphones as we come in, we hear the

control tower talking to a small plane lined up to land ahead of

us: “When you get down, take a look at what the guy behind

you is flying. You’re not gonna believe it!”

After Armando ties the Mosquito down for the night, we run

into the air traffic controller in the parking lot. “That’s quite a

little bird you’ve got,” he says. He compliments Armando on

his flying skills but says, “The problem is that your plane is

so small, it doesn’t always show up on my radar. You kind of

blink in and out, and I don’t really know where you are. It can

get kind of nerve-wracking.”

At dinner, Armando tells me that in Caracas his family

owned a large flea market that was nationalized by Hugo

Chavez’s government. He also once worked as a personal

computer guy for the country’s former first lady, Doña Blanca,

who had been his neighbor when he was growing up.

I ask how he got into flying, and he says that ever since his

father sailed solo from Florida to Venezuela

was a boy, he had dreamed of making the

In the late 1990s he got serious about it,

Internet, he hooked up with hang-gliding lege

Gibson, who manufactures his high-perform

ultralights near Houston.

Gibbo taught him to fly but forbade him fr

Venezuela trip for at least a couple of years.

Armando says, Gibbo would call him up on

was a tornado warning and say, “You want

Caribbean? Today is a good day to practice.”

He finally got Gibbo’s blessing, and after

Bahamas, he made his dream flight to Ve

skipping from island to island with only his o

as a flight plan.

Early the next morning, Armando an

Mosquito to Maui while I jet over to grab a

can of fuel. When I catch up with them at the

airport in the Kapalua resort area, the Mosq

the airport’s tiny parking lot, and Armando

surrounded by airport officials and security gu

It turns out that private aircraft aren’t allo

so in order to get permission to land, Arman

a fuel emergency. “I call the guy in the tower

‘I’m sorry, sir, you’re not allowed to land

tells me. “Then he says, ‘Sir, where are you

What are you flying? I can’t see you!’”

When the security guards came out to sco

charmed them into instant allies. Now th

joking and grinning like school kids as he ref

a passenger prop plane to come and go. On

in a TSA uniform keeps saying over and o

cool!” Armando invites them all to come

any time. When he finally jumps back into

flits off into the blue, they all stand on th

goodbye.

After a refueling stop at Maui’s main a

where the Mosquito is dwarfed by huge jet

down the runway, Armando takes off around

of Haleakalä volcano toward the remote rura

the island’s eastern tip. Meanwhile, Sergio an

the notoriously winding Häna Highway.

We’ve brought along a small two-way r

while Armando hails us to say that he’s worr

he’s going to try to touch down at Ke‘anae, a

“Give me five, big guy!” At every stop, Armando enchanted stunned onlookers with his infectious enthusiasm and warmth

Ke‘anae man and his son wandered over after the Mosquito dropped out of the sky onto the East Maui village’s small ocean

baseball diamond. “You have a beautiful family,” Armando told the man.



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.

54

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!”

hana hou: the magazine of hawaiian airlines

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