Mundo Moss » Blog Archive » Around the world by single-engine aircraft (1989-92)

Around the world by single-engine aircraft (1989-92)

In June 1989, Gérard and Margi Moss took off from Rio de Janeiro for a flying venture which would take them on a circuitous path around the world in their single-engine aircraft, Romeo.

They visited fifty countries on four continents and made two major ocean crossings, the South Atlantic (Recife-Fernando de Noronha-Ilha do Sal-Dakar) and the South Pacific (Cairns, Australia to Santiago, Chile), the latter being a world first in a single-engine.

They started their journey way before the availability of GPS, which has totally changed the art of navigation, and acquired their first “pre=historic” version half-way through the voyage. And this new-fangled gadget gave them the confidence to cross the South Pacific and home in on that tiny dot of land called Easter Island. That long haul across the South Pacific gave them an extraordinary record: unbelievably, the first such crossing by single-engine from Australia to South America.

The special moments they encountered along the way were numerous: reaching the legendary city of Timbuktu; finding the Mountain gorillas in the forests of Zaire; diving the kaleidoscopic waters of Sipadan Island off Borneo; the sunset-picnic beside the magical moai on Easter Island. These were spiced with more worrying adventures: flying into a sandstorm in Mali; landing at a military airfield in Guinea-Bissau; threatened to be intercepted by F-16s in Thailand; the beginning of a fire in the engine whilst airborne; and lastly, almost losing Romeo during the relentless battering of a 5-day hurricane in Western Samoa.

Thirty-two months later, they landed back in Brazil. They became the first (and are still the only) Brazilians and indeed the first (and still the only) South Americans to fly around the world in a light aircraft. Their experiences were recounted in their book, Freedom of the Skies, published by Airlife Publishing, England (since gone bankrupt but apparently not because of their book!)

A few statistics about their flight around the world:

120,000 km (three times the circumference of the Earth)
700 flight hours
312 landings
138 dollars – the most expensive landing fees (São Tomé Island)
50 countries
32 months
4 continents
1.70 dollars – the cheapest hotel (Inhambane, Mozambique)
1 flat tyre
Zero engine failures!

List of destinations visited

Here are some glimpses of this voyage:

Map of route flown

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