The "Dash" Is Over... But Will It Be A Record?

ANN REALTIME REPORTING 12.11.08 1130 EST: "The Team is on the Ground!" That's the triumphant message on the Web site for the ALS "Dash For A Cure," a seven-day round-the-world marathon flight to raise money and awareness for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, more commonly known as ALS and Lou Gehrig's disease. Pilots CarolAnn Garratt and Carol Foy landed their Mooney M20J at Orlando International Airport (MCO) at approximately 0855 EST Thursday morning.

"Carol and CarolAnn climbed out of the well traveled Mooney, that actually looked no worse for wear than when they left here 7 days ago," reads a message posted on the Dash web site. "The crew looks fantastic and are obviously "pumped" with the completion of the Dash trip."

"We did it!" Garratt exclaimed as she stepped out of the Mooney's cockpit, reports The Orlando Sentinel. "I kept it together until touchdown, and then I just started crying."

The women alternated sleep schedules, and restricted their in-flight diet to two pieces of fruit, two energy wafers and a few macadamia nuts each day. Early on, they were able to stop and sleep at hotels... but that luxury largely disappeared as time went on.

Foy admits "there were a couple of little bitchy moments" in spending so much time together in the cramped space of the Mooney's cockpit, "but we found that as soon as we got a little sleep, we were fine."

The landing came at the end of a 3300 nm, mostly nighttime crossing over the Atlantic ocean, where the pilots kept a constant eye out for storms brought about by a cold front... that also provided the team with a welcome westerly crosswind. The team barely beat in a strong storm system over Florida.

Final times for the trip have yet to be tabulated, so we don't know officially whether the team actually set a new world record. A person close to the team tells ANN total time for the trip was approximately 204 hours, or 8.5 days... about a day longer than Garratt and Foy had originally calculated, thanks to a detour to find avgas in Africa.

That should still be good enough -- but then again, the flight wasn't really about setting a world record. Paying 100 percent of the trip expenses, the pilots hoped to raise $1 million to find a cure for ALS, a neurodegenerative disease which attacks the motor neurons in the brain and spinal cord resulting in progressive paralysis and is considered fatal. There is no known effective treatment for ALS.

After losing her mother to ALS in 2002, Garratt vowed to fly around the world to raise awareness and donations for the disease that took her mother's life. She did that in 2003, albeit at a more leisurely pace.

One of Carol Foy's family members was also diagnosed last year with ALS... which kills 90 percent of those inflicted within five years.

So far, the flight has raised some $415,000 towards Garratt's and Foy's $1 million goal.

FMI: www.alsworldflight.com