Meanwhile, 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. “Baby,” I think, “just a couple of hours apart and I missed you so much!” I’m starting to sound like Armando already.
Sergio and Armando are waiting for me in the parking lot, where they’re ruffling through ragged maps and scraps of paper, chaotically trying to plot our next move. As I walk up to the rental car, Sergio lifts his head and deadpans: “See, there’s nothing to worry about. You’re in the hands of South Americans!”
Nearby, 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!”
“Oh yeah,” Sergio says, “we’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, site of the notorious former leprosy colony.
The wind is roaring against us and we inch along, until needles of rain start to sting our faces and 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 control tower guy 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’ 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 when Armando was a boy, he had dreamed of making the same trip by air. In the late 1990s, he got serious about it, and through the Internet, he hooked up with hang-gliding legend Mark “Gibbo” Gibson, who manufactures his high-performance GibboGear ultralights near Houston.
Gibbo taught him to fly, but forbade him from attempting the Venezuela trip for at least a couple of years. In the meantime, Armando says, Gibbo would call him up on days when there was a tornado warning and say, “You want to fly across the Caribbean? Today is a good day to practice.”
He finally got Gibbo’s blessing, and after a trial run to the Bahamas, he made his dream to flight to Venezuela in 2004, skipping from island to island with only his optimism and trust as a flight plan.

Early the next morning, Armando and Sergio fly the Mosquito to Maui, while I jet over to grab a rental car and a can of fuel. When I catch up with them at the small commuter airport in the Kapalua resort area, the Mosquito is sitting in the airport’s tiny parking lot, and Armando and Sergio are surrounded by airport officials and security guards.
It turns out that private aircraft aren’t allowed at Kapalua, so in order to get permission to land, Armando had to declare a fuel emergency. “I call the guy in the tower, and he tells me, ‘I’m sorry sir, you’re not allowed to land here,’” Armando relates. “Then he says, ‘Sir, where are you? Who are you? What are you flying? I can’t see you!’”
When the security guards came out to scold him, Armando charmed them into instant allies. Now they stand around joking with him and grinning like school kids as he refuels and waits for a passenger prop plane to come and go. One smiling woman in a TSA uniform keeps saying over and over, “That is too cool!”
Armando invites them all to come flying with him anytime. When he finally jumps back into Mosquito and flits off into the blue, they all stand on the runway waving goodbye.
After a refueling stop at Maui’s main Kahului airport, where the Mosquito is dwarfed by huge jets roaring up and down the runway, Armando takes off around the massive slope of Haleakalä volcano toward the remote rural town of Häna at the island’s eastern tip. Meanwhile, Sergio and I give chase on the notoriously winding mountainside road.
We’ve brought along a small two-way radio, and after a while Armando hails us to say that he’s worried about fuel and he’s going to try to touch down at Ke‘anae, a small peninsula that offers the only level bit of land along the rugged coast.
We race down the 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 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 small 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 snackbar-sized terminal. It turns out they fly their own ultralights here, so friendly, if vaguely competitive, shop talk quickly 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.” 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 trans-Atlantic flyer Charles Lindbergh. Lindbergh had a home in Kïpahulu that
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  he dearly loved, and in 1974, wracked with cancer, he asked to be flown there from a hospital in New York to 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 perched on a cliff overlooking the ocean amid the lush east Maui forest.
After a little searching, we find the find the rutted lane to the rustic church and follow a path around back to his gravesite in a serene, well-tended garden. 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 small clearing at the edge of the cliff. Far 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 is to be Armando’s landfall on the last island in his joy ride 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 off across the channel with Sergio pulling ground support duty, while I have to catch a boring old commercial flight back to my terrestrial life in Honolulu. I have no way to know it, but our parting is the last time I ever see Sergio. Not long afterward, we lost him in an accident while he was freediving – something he dearly loved.
Reclining in the pressurized cabin as the steel bird blazes across the miles, 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.
On the way down, the pilot announces that “the winds are gusting to 30 knots, so it might get a little bumpy coming in.”
“Bumpy?” I think slyly to myself. “You call this bumpy? You should try flying in our little Mosquito!”

Catching the Mosquito 
Armando loves to take adventurous passengers flying in his little Mosquito.
You can also watch a video slideshow that Sergio made of Armando’s interisland exploits by searching for “Flight of the Mosquito” on YouTube.