Pilots

If anthropologists were to perform a study of pilots, they'd find two subspecies: In the majority, Pilotus waltermittyus, they would find pilots dreaming of abandoning the rat race and squandering their fortunes while cruising above remote and primitive places in a rickety-looking adventure ship. In the minority, the dwindling and endangered (though unelusive) Pilotus nationalgeographicus, they would find a few elderly astronauts, a couple of heavily sideburned specimens named Rutan, two Yeagers (unrelated), and one erstwhile institutional broker named Peter McMillan.

McMillan's Wonder Bread years seem perfect for what was to come: He was born in North Carolina (you can discern the Pilotus's requisite Southern accent in his voice), and his mom even has a snapshot of him at the Wright brothers' monument at Kitty Hawk. After he got his business degree at Chapel Hill, he moved to New York and put in his time on Wall Street. Then he moved to San Francisco and into an even more lucrative career. His hours were 4 a.m. to 2 p.m. — brutal to most; to McMillan it was an opportunity to take flying lessons. The day he got his certificate he bought a Stearman, partly for the aura, he says, but partly because "It's a good trainer and a challenging airplane to fly real well." Other classics followed: A Cessna 195; a Bücker Jungmeister; then, in 1986, a North American T-6.

"I wanted to do something dramatic with the T-6," McMillan says, "so I shipped it to England and flew it to Australia with a backseater, and we had a great adventure." They flew only by heading indicator and compass, but the whole experience left him charged and ready to do more.

On a camping trip with Aussie adventurer Lang Kidby, they had begun running out of off-color jokes to tell one another, so talk turned to monumental flights in history. The greatest, they concluded, was one undertaken from England to Australia in 1919 by brothers Ross and Keith Smith, flying a twin-engine Vickers Vimy bomber. The trip, which linked the antipodal ends of the British Empire, took 28 days. "These guys were like astronauts," McMillan says. "It was the first time the airplane was used in an expeditionary sense." Lang and McMillan decided that they'd like to try reenacting the flight — in a Vimy, naturally.

The first hurdle was obtaining a huge airplane that has been out of production for 70 years. Since only four were known to exist — in air museums — McMillan decided to build one from scratch. He enlisted the help of craftsman John LaNoue; in 16 months a new Vimy rose from the floor of a California hangar. It was August 1994. After a few brief test flights McMillan shipped the Vimy to Farnborough, and, with just 33 hours on its airframe, he and Lang set off for the land down under.

McMillan recalls, "We learned a lot of unusual techniques" — not surprising when you consider that one Vimy aileron is the size of a Cessna 172's wing and it has no hydraulic boost. "The ailerons were so heavy it was like weightlifting, so we would use the rudder and differential power to turn."

Rain and rough weather whipped at the low, slow biplane and wore at the pilots' spirits, too. But high points abounded. Among them, flying over civilization's great monuments such as the Leaning Tower of Pisa, Egypt's Great Pyramids, and the Taj Mahal. And then there was that day crossing the desert in Saudi Arabia. "We chased camels with the airplane — it was glorious," he recalls.

Once they got into India, the 11-hour days flying the ancient-handling bomber began to take their toll on the pilots. "Everywhere past Delhi there were very few options for forced landing," he says. "The entire route from eastern India on, there was nothing but swamps, jungles, or ocean. It was psychologically debilitating." As if they had tempted the Fates too long, over Sumatra the Vimy's right engine died and the stricken machine sank jungleward. At the last second McMillan spotted a dryish rice paddy, and he set the bomber down on it hard, managing to stop just a few feet short of some trees. Hundreds of villagers appeared from nowhere to help them cut a swath in the jungle, and within six days they had replaced the blown engine, repaired damage to the undercarriage, and continued on their way once again.

But the crash had jangled their nerves. "From Timor to Australia it was eight hours of nothing but water. I never anticipated how much fear had built up," McMillan says. "The engines — one of which was installed with a Swiss army knife — sounded crappy all the time. Every five minutes I would go through a complete cycle: 'We're not going to make it�no, we're going to make it,' then I'd hear a little burble in an engine and the cycle would start again. But when we could finally see the coastline of Australia, it was unbelievable."

Their ultimate goal was Adelaide, the home of the Smiths' original Vimy. On the way there, they landed at a tiny village, and locals took them to a plaque marking the spot where the Smiths had made a forced landing. Nearby lay a pile of rusting gas cans from which the brothers had refueled more than 70 years prior. For McMillan, the journey was complete.

He has a new goal: to fly the Vimy across the Atlantic, following Alcock and Brown's pioneering 1919 voyage. But first he has to go back to work and refill his dwindled war chest. After all, being a Pilotus nationalgeographicus takes more than simply an adventurous spirit.