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 STORY BY DEREK FERRAR PHOTOS BY SERGIO GOES

The first time I meet Armando Martinez, he’s picking up his airplane. I mean,
literally lifting up the nose of the hang glider-like ultralight, which he lovingly
calls “my little Mosquito,” and hauling it out of its hangar at Dillingham Field,
a serene little airstrip on a remote stretch of O‘ahu’s North Shore.
Going through his preflight check, it’s obvious that Armando’s steamy love
affair with his little Mosquito is the stuff of telenovelas. He adoringly sweeps
his eyes over her every surface: the golden fabric of her wing, her svelte “trike”
fuselage, her perky little motor, the curves of the twin propeller at her rear.
He makes it clear from the get-go that he is ready to lay down his life for
her. “I have to tell you, people have been hurt flying the ultralights; some
have died,” he says earnestly in his peculiar accent—think Desi Arnaz meets
Sylvester the Cat. “I believe it is very safe. But if God is calling for me, then
I can be in the safest place in world, and still I go to Him.”
So much for “Welcome aboard.”
I’ve known Armando for only a few minutes, and already the Big Island to O‘ahu—but that was different and left out
he’s calling me his “berry good friend.” He has me wriggle Kaua‘i.) Anyway, it’s all part of Armando’s grand plan to
into an olive-drab flight suit that matches his own and pats me eventually fly the Mosquito around all fifty states.
down. It’s a precaution, he says, against a cell phone, keys Through a mutual friend, Brazilian-born photographer
or anything else drifting out of a pocket and getting sucked Sergio Goes, I’ve been recruited to tag along as part reporter,
back into the Mosquito’s prop, which at 5,000 rpm could prove part passenger and part ground crew. Sergio and I will be leap-
a fatal screw-up. frogging in and out of airports and rental cars down the length
I gather that your average ultralight pilot would have a hard of the archipelago, chasing the Mosquito with containers of
time just keeping the souped-up, small-winged Mosquito— the carefully measured gas-and-oil mixture Armando needs to
a customized version of a GibboGear Manta model—in the air. power the little two-stroke motor.
But Armando is hardly your average ultralight pilot; he once When I meet up with him at Dillingham, he’s already flown
set records and made headlines by island-hopping 3,000 miles north from O‘ahu to Kaua‘i and back; now he’s heading south.
across the Caribbean from his adoptive Florida to his native He and Sergio huddle in the Mosquito’s small hangar, ruffling
Venezuela in “nineteen beautiful days.” through ragged maps and scraps of paper, chaotically trying
Nowadays he spends a lot of time in Hawai‘i, where his son, to plot out the trip. When I ask nervously whether it mightn’t
Nacho, is stationed in the Air Force, and he’s come up with be a bit late in the game to be figuring out a flight plan, Sergio
another island-hopping mission: to become the first person lifts his head and deadpans, “Relax, there’s nothing to worry
anyone can think of to fly the whole length of the main Hawaiian about. You’re in the hands of South Americans!”
chain in an ultralight. (OK, there were these two zany brothers
from Florida calling themselves “The Wrong Brothers” who A few minutes later, I’m squeezing into the Mosquito’s
created a big media splash in 1980 by flying straight from minuscule back seat to ride along on the next leg of the trip,

All systems go: Our man in the sky Derek Ferrar (back seat) with ultralight pilot extraordinaire Armando Martinez. Martinez (also
opening spread, flying with his son Nacho off Ka‘ena Point, O‘ahu) has already island-hopped his “Mosquito” from Venezuela to
Florida; now he’s hoping to become the first ultralight pilot to fly the main Hawaiian Island chain, from Kaua‘i to the Big Island.

48 49
clear across the island to Sandy Beach. Armando makes sure
I’m strapped in tight, then fits me with a bulky headset so we
can talk to each other over the rush of the wind and piercing
buzz of the engine.
He leans over me to pull-start the Mosquito like a lawn
mower. After a couple of tugs, the motor hacks to life, and
Armando jumps in the front seat. As we taxi, I’m struck again
by how little there is to this thing. His back is between my
legs, and my feet rest on pegs outside the fiberglass cowling like
I’m a Backseat Betty on a Harley run.
Armando’s got the Mosquito stripped down to a minimum
weight of about 300 pounds. A hand-held GPS serves as the
instrument panel, and a walkie-talkie is our radio. There’s no
fuel gauge; he checks the level by leaning out of the trike in
midflight to eyeball a translucent strip in the fiberglass gas
tank. The one luxury item is an iPod velcroed to the dashboard
which pumps Armando’s collection of classic rock tunes through
our headphones. As we roll out onto the tarmac for takeoff,
Kansas’ “Dust in the Wind” is blasting. I am not comforted.
We pick up speed for a few yards, and then—poof!—we’re
suddenly off the ground. At first I grip the sides of the trike
with white knuckles, overcome by the feeling that I’m just
going to tumble out into midair, especially when Armando
banks a series of steep turns to catch an updraft off the
cliff face. But gradually I relax into the powerlessness of the
passenger, surrendering to Armando’s flying mastery, come
what may.
The Mosquito skews side to side disconcertingly, but
Armando has it under control. He tells me later that once you
master the art of surfing the air currents, it just becomes a
matter of trimming the steering bar with small nudges. Just like
surfers can feel the movement and spirit of the living ocean, he
says, “in the Mosquito, you really feel the spirit of the sky.”
We fly out over the ocean, where he points out a whale
breaching and kite surfers racing along the shore. I don’t realize
how high we’ve risen until I see how tiny their fluttering airfoils
look below us. Although it’s barely past dawn, a strong head
wind is already cranking against us. We seem to crawl along,
with the groundspeed display on the little GPS unit barely
registering 30 miles an hour. (With no wind, Armando tells me,
the Mosquito will average around 75.)
Beneath us, the farms of Mokulë‘ia roll by, and from this
vantage point I see hidden estates and secret ravines I never
knew were there. We follow the artery of the highway up over
O‘ahu’s central plateau, with the military bases and housing
developments forming circuit-board patterns below.
Halfway across the island, Armando cuts east toward the
Photographer Sergio Goes (red flight suit) took advantage of the unique aerial perspectives to shoot the patterns and
geometries of Hawai‘i’s landscapes, often leaning precariously far out of the trike. “Hanging from wing in the trike, we are
like water sloshing in bucket,” Armando says, “and I am like a big hand holding bucket. My job is not to spill it.”
50
Ko‘olau mountain ridge. Soon the fingers of steep, folded rock
sweep up toward us alarmingly. Ahead, a gap in the ridge-line
scrapes the bottom of a roiling cloud bank, with the taller
peaks on either side lost in mist. My teeth are chattering, and
it’s only partly because of the biting cold wind at 4,000 feet.
Armando aims to squeeze through the slim gap between
rock and cloud. Too high, and we’ll be flying blind in the
unpredictable cloud drafts. Too low, and, well …
“Hang on,” he warns over the headset. “It’s going to
get bumpy.”
Understatement. As we approach the ridge, blasts of wind
slam us around, and the Mosquito bucks and rolls as Armando
surfs the sky, grunting as he muscles the wing around. A wall of
cloud streams up over the ridge and rolls abruptly down toward
us like a breaking wave. We’re almost enveloped until Armando
pulls a quick dive under it.
Suddenly the ridge is maybe 100 feet below us, looking way
too close for comfort. Just as quickly, it drops away on the
other side, and we’re through. The expanse of O‘ahu’s Wind-
ward side opens up ahead: rooftops, golf courses and the broad
sweep of Käne‘ohe Bay dotted with ivory sandbanks.
We head south, with the cold crosswind now driving us
along at a much faster clip. Almost before I realize it, we’re
approaching the island’s rocky southeast corner, and the air
begins to warm as we descend. We cross out over the water
next to the ashy cone of Koko Crater, and Armando drops the
Mosquito suddenly into a steep downward spiral.
“It’s no good to fly low for a long a time in this wind,”
he tosses back through the headset. “Better to just go for it!”
For a moment, the arc of our turn sends us dead for the
crater slope, and I taste my heart in the back of my throat.
Then, in an instant, we wheel around and plop sharply onto the
broad lawn at Sandy Beach, a popular landing pad for the
hang gliders and other sky junkies who ride the updrafts
against the cliffs nearby.
As we swoop down, a lone figure waves us in like a traffic
cop. Armando rolls the Mosquito across the lawn to a bathroom
blockhouse at the far end, its walls painted with murals of
Hawaiian surf heroes.
The traffic cop comes trotting up. He’s Eddie Tadao, a
Vietnam vet helicopter pilot who now spends his days flying
an assortment of kites on the breezy lawn at Sandy’s, decked
out in an array of fanny packs, utility belts and a vest bejeweled
with a multitude of colored carabiner clips. He’s the one-man
air traffic tower of Sandy Beach, proudly calling the strip of
grass “my little airport.” Eddie used to fly ultralights and
paragliders himself, he tells us, until one day he came down
51
 hard near the bathroom and busted himself up pretty good. He
shows us the scars where he broke his arm and pelvis, and
where they operated on his ruptured spleen. His wife divorced
him, he says, because he spent all his weekends flying.
With the wind as strong as it is, Armando thinks it’s wiser
to make the flight over the channel to Moloka‘i solo. And I’m
OK with that. Sergio drives up with a can of fuel, and Armando
quickly drains it into the Mosquito’s tank. He yanks the starter
and rolls to the far end of the lawn, then pops off into the
wind, with Eddie waving him on.
Meanwhile, Sergio and 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.
Armando meets us in the parking lot, where 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!”
“Well, amigo,” Sergio tells Armando, “it looks like you’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.
The wind roars against us, and needles of rain start to sting
our faces, so before long 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 air traffic controller 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’s 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
“Give me five, big guy!” At every stop, Armando enchanted stunned onlookers with his infectious enthusiasm and warmth. This
Ke‘anae man and his son wandered over after the Mosquito dropped out of the sky onto the East Maui village’s small oceanfront
baseball diamond. “You have a beautiful family,” Armando told the man.
52
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 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
tells me. “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 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
any time. When he finally jumps back into the Mosquito and
flits off into the blue, they all stand on the runway, waving
goodbye.
After a refueling stop at Maui’s main airport in Kahului,
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 Häna Highway.
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
53
that offers the only level bit of land along the rugged coast.
We race down a 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 of 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 young
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 snack bar-size terminal. It
turns out they fly their own ultralights here, so friendly if
vaguely competitive shop-talk 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.”
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 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 transatlantic flier Charles
GPS? Check. Walkie-talkie? Check. iPod? Check. Mystical light show beckoning on the horizon? Roger that. As Armando would
say (a dozen times a day): “We’re good to go ... cannot get any better than this!”
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Lindbergh. Lindbergh had a home in Kïpahulu that he 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 on a cliff
overlooking the ocean in the lush East Maui forest.
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 clearing at the cliff’s edge. 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 will be Armando’s
landfall on the last island in his joyride 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 across the channel with
Sergio pulling ground support duty. Meanwhile, I have to catch
a boring old commercial flight back to my terrestrial life in
Honolulu. There’s no way of knowing it, but our parting is to
be the last time I ever see Sergio. Just a couple of months later
we lost him in an accident while he was freediving—something
he dearly loved.
While I’m waiting for my flight, they call me from the
airstrip at ‘Upolu to shout over the wind that Armando has made
it. “Derek, my berry good friend,” Armando gushes, “my little
Mosquito has brought me to the Big Island, and we really like
it! I think she wants me to stay here with her for a while!”
Later, reclining in the pressurized cabin as the steel bird
blazes across the miles toward O‘ahu, 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.
My chest feels funny, and I realize with a jolt that it’s
heartache. Just a few hours apart, and already I’m pining for the
sweet bite of Armando’s little … of our little Mosquito. HH
Catching the Mosquito
Armando loves to take adventurous passengers flying in
his little Mosquito. You can reach him at (808) 388 - 1765
or amadeux2004@yahoo.com.
You can also watch a video slide show that Sergio made
of Armando’s interisland exploits by searching for “Flight
of the Mosquito” on YouTube.
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