Stories on Flight of Tony Aliengena

This letter is to express my appreciation for the wonderful news stories that you are writing about the flight of Tony Aliengena around the world and across Russia.

The amazing thing is that his and Lance Allyn’s trip is to places that are not on the map. My 20-year-old world globe does not show Tumen, Bratsk or Mirnyi, not to mention Providenia. David Puckett’s terrific map (July 2) may cause a million California readers to focus in on the vastness of the Soviet Union. I for one, a pilot of a single-engine Beechcraft Bonanza based in Orange County, am sometimes aloft with these California adventurers, looking down on the wilderness (without rescue systems) and with my head in the engine compartment thinking about alternators, fuel system, hot pistons, oil pressure, magnetos holding together and hoping that the Russian navigators also know emergency landing fields.

Although they are no Lindberghs, Howard Hugheses or Wiley Posts, these California fliers in their small Cessnas, Beechcrafts, flying over this great Siberian topography, they are in some ways “pushing the outside of the envelope.”

RUSSELL W. CARPENTER

Newport Beach