It was such a relief last week to learn that my old friend Bob Gannon crashed his 56-year-old Cessna 182 just outside of Las Vegas.

Of course, he walked away from the crash. The plane wasn’t called Lucky Lady Too for nothing.

Let me interject that I am simply relieved to know that Bob is still alive. And flying. I confess that I periodically check the news for recent Bob Gannon and Lady Too exploits — or an obituary. I haven’t found either in years.

Both to my distress and relief.

That “Too” suggests a previous Lady. And, yes, there was one. A Piper Cherokee 6. He crashed her in 1992 – the same year he bought her and got his pilot’s instrument license for flying. Days after getting the license and with only 148 hours of flying time, Bob took off from San Diego for a Harvard Business School reunion.

In Paris. 

He made it and kept on flying. By Christmas, he logged an additional 137 hours of flight time, making 75 landings in 12 countries. He’d gotten halfway around the world.

He crashed on take-off from Nairobi Wilson Airport, in Kenya, just before Christmas.

That was the first time. 

Bob returned to San Diego on a commercial flight and spent the next eight years working on his businesses and renting planes from a flight club. He’d made it halfway around the world before “pilot error” in Kenya did him in.

In 2000, Bob bought a well-used Cessna 182 from the San Diego flying club. The plane had been flying since 1968. He took off from San Diego and spent the next 10 years circling the world – more than twice, as I recall.

Circling isn’t quite right. He flew where his spirit and ambitions moved him — and politics and war would allow him. Rarely in a straight line. Always with a plan but never with an agenda.

He landed in 1,200 places. Not all were airports – some were cow pastures and dirt roads. He checked off 155 countries and all 50 states in the U.S. He touched down on all seven continents, flew over the North Pole, and landed in Marambio Joint Antarctic Base on the Antarctic Peninsula.

As Bob wrote, “Lucky Lady Too has the record for landing in more places in more countries on all the continents than any airplane in aviation history. She had been in a crash before I bought her. And before I bought her, she was rented with an instructor by two of the terrorists who flew into the World Trade Center. Quite a life, huh?”

Quite a life. I’ll say. Both man and plane.

Periodically, Bob would park his Cessna with mechanics and fly home on commercial airlines to take care of business. Luck Lady Too was treated to rejuvenating spa days while Bob was away. At some point, Bob shifted his home base from San Diego to Las Vegas, for tax reasons.

After 10 years on this incredible odyssey, Bob decided it was time to return home. That meant home to Gillespie Field in East San Diego County, in the city of El Cajon.

That’s where Bob first took off from in the Fall of 2000. A full circle, a decade in the making, he would land on January 8, 2011.

And that’s where I came into the picture.

After nearly 30 years with various reincarnations of the San Diego Union-Tribune covering arts, entertainment, technology, and news,  I suddenly discovered that I was the newspaper’s transportation specialist. 

It was one of those quirky things that happen when a predatory equity firm buys your newspaper, fires everyone, then gives you the chance to reapply for any three positions.

Bob Gannon’s story may not technically be a transportation beat story, but I wasn’t about to pass it up. Ten years flying around the world in a little Cessna? An aerial vagabond, a gypsy with wings? The prodigal pilot flies home?

Who wouldn’t want to write that story?

Of course, I couldn’t actually wait for Bob to land in San Diego. In early December of 2010, I called him in Mexico, where he was camping out, and we had a long and productive interview that turned into a friendly conversation.

Ironically, he was in San Miguel de Allende, the town that has been our home now for the last seven years. A nice coincidence.

I mentioned to Bob that Rose and I were traveling to Baja Sur for Christmas. Staying with friends in Los Barriles. He knew of a small airstrip just north of where we were staying. He could skip over the Sea of Cortez, drop in for a day, and we could meet in person.

Next thing I knew, Bob was at the head of the table for Christmas Eve dinner and enthralling about 20 guests with tales from his globe-hopping decade. Let’s face it, anyone who spent the last 10 years circling the Earth in a tiny airplane is going to be the life of the party.

No surprise there, Bob is a most delightful raconteur. 

When he learned that Rose and I were scoping out Los Barriles as the site for our future wedding, he had a question.

Why wait?

Then another question: Why not get married tonight?

Bob is a great fan of acting impulsively, as you might suspect.

Even though we had no good objection, we decided to stick to the plan. But that certainly kept the dinner lively. Half the guests sided with Bob and voted for a wedding, and half said to wait and plan everything out.

(As fate would have it, we ended up eloping on St. Lucia in the Caribbean months before the official family-and-friends wedding in Los Barriles on Feb. 2, 2012.)

That night, Bob went back to his hotel in town with at least 20 new friends, having given us all a most memorable Christmas gift, an unforgettable night of camaraderie and conviviality. And before he left, he invited us all to the airstrip for some short flights around Los Barriles.

The thing is, when Bob returned to the hotel, he invited everybody in Los Barriles to the airstrip.

No exaggeration. Everybody.

By the time we got there, the line of local families was impressive. Bob Gannon spent Christmas Day fulfilling his promise. Many who flew that day were kids and their parents who had never seen an airplane, much less dreamed of flying.

The looks on these faces? Ecstatic. Bob wasn’t just giving a brief thrill to a bunch of people. He was opening up whole new worlds of possibility, expanding horizons to local youngsters and their parents. Once you’ve flown with Bob Gannon and taken the controls of Lucky Lady Too for a few minutes, your feet never completely touch the ground.

It is the sort of thing he did all over the world.

I’ll bet you could add to this to his list of flying records: that Bob Gannon and the Luck Lady Too took up to the skies more people for the first time in their lives than any other non-commercial airplane.

He is a sort of Ambassador from the World of Dream Big.

And here’s a thought: the same plane on which two Saudi terrorists learned to fly commercial jets into the World Trade Center towers, spent its remaining years sending wide-eyed kids and their wonder-struck parents up into the deep blue sky with Bob Gannon. Who knows how many lives were changed for the better by this act of selfless generosity?

On January 8, 2011, when Bob landed at Gillespie Field, there was quite a crowd to meet him. A lot of them were single women with leis, flowers, and cakes. I might have mentioned in the advance story I wrote that Bob was single, financially independent, and ruggedly handsome. All of which was quite true.

Like all newspaper stories, the return of the prodigal son to San Diego enjoyed its news cycle and then quietly faded away. The landing at Gillespie Field was ceremonial and symbolic, ending where the odyssey began, but hardly the end.

He never said he was hanging up his wings.

He simply flew off toward the next horizon.

Bob eventually returned to his home in Las Vegas. As I sort of suspected, that wasn’t the end of his wanderlust. We communicated off and on, and I learned that Bob and Lucky Lady Too were off on new adventures to new destinations.

And then, on April 25, I got an e-mail from Bob titled “A TALE OF TWO AIRPLANES.”

In short, on April 13, Bob was doing what he loves to do – taking friends up in Lucky Lady Too for a spin around the countryside.  He was flying a contractor friend and his two sons over Las Vegas when trouble started. The engine was running and the prop was spinning, but the plane was dropping.

He considered a landing on I-15, but not surprisingly, it was filled in both directions with 80 mph traffic – people crazy to get to Las Vegas and people crazy to get away from it. He was doing less than 55 mph.

He aimed for northbound Las Vegas Boulevard on the outskirts, at only 300 feet of altitude. Just as he was about to touch down, a southbound jeep careened into sight. To avoid a head-on, Bob hopped and skipped the Lucky Lady Too and veered for an adjacent ditch.

The landing knocked the right wheel off as the plane skittered over rough ground. Bob’s friend, who was whacked in the back of the head, was taken to the hospital for an MRI and released. The two sons and Bob were fine. 

Not so, Lucky Lady Too.

She was towed away and, Bob says, sits on the “Row of Shame” at Henderson Executive Airport, awaiting federal inspection.

In classic Bob Gannon-fashion, he concludes, “In my 32 years of GA flying I have owned two airplanes. I have now totaled both. But they never hurt me … except in the pocketbook.”

To me, Bob Gannon is right up there with Sky King and Han Solo. And given his survival record, maybe Superman.

I’m betting he is back up in the air, too, before long with a Lucky Lady Three.

After all, as he once told an interviewer, “Life is a short flight. If you can do it, do it now!”

Words to live by. And fly by.

(All photos courtesy of Robert Gannon.)