Lee Owens Thinks Global 

Lee Owens is $200,000 short and 25,000 miles from his goal of becoming the first black man to fly around the world in a single-engine airplane. However, that isn't stopping him. The 54-year-old chief pilot at Glendale Aviation is determined to make the trip, his homage to the Tuskegee Airmen of World War II, the all-Black flying group.

"The Tuskegee Airmen, they made it possible for me to become a pilot, a better person, a better human being," Owens said. "If I have to mortgage my house . . . whatever we have to do to make this trip."

So far, through donations, Owens has raised $125,000 of the $325,000 he has estimated it will cost to make the trip. That includes the $100,000 cost of the three-quarter-size P-51 Mustang, a model of the World War II fighter used by the Tuskegee Airmen and its equipment of special tanks, radios, navigation equipment and global positioning systems to circle the globe safely. The estimate also accounts for fuel, meals and lodging for a four-person support crew that will trail Owens.

Owens has always marveled flight and the pioneers who helped transform it into the vital mode of transportation it is today. He fell in love with the sky when, as a young boy, he worked with his father in the cotton fields of Mississippi loading crop-duster airplanes. He graduated from college with a degree in aviation management and joined the Air Force.

In the Air Force he would see Black officers, but in the tiny schools where he was educated, he wasn't taught about the aviators who would later become his heroes, the Tuskegee Airmen. Owens first learned of the World War II Black aviators much later in life, after he retired from the Air Force.

"It took a Caucasian, C.J. Alexander in Phoenix, who told me, 'You got something special in you. You're like the Tuskegee Airmen.' "

Owen intends to mimic Charles Lindbergh's 1927 solo trans-Atlantic flight on May 27. Upon his return, Owens plans to speak to youths across the country to help educate them about the Tuskegee Airmen's contributions to aviation history. But first, he needs to get off the ground.

FMI: www.glendaleaviation.com