• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Home
  • Contact

Golf Hotel Whiskey

Golf Hotel Whiskey: for pilots and aviation enthusiasts

Pilot plans 90 border crossing to celebrate a 90th birthday

Yesterday, pilot John Lawton was scheduled (weather permitting) to celebrate his 9oth birthday by using his Cessna 172 to make 90 flying passages across the US-Canadian border. According to the flight plans, Lawton would spend an estimated one to two hours at an altitude of around 3,500 feet and perform a series of tight or almost aerobatic figure-eight patterns in his aircraft. Lawton’s non-pilot daughter was also scheduled to be aboard while his pilot son was going to stay on the ground so that no one could question who was at the controls.

Lawton has been a pilot for 56 years and has more than 6,000 hours of flying in more than 40 models of aircraft. He is also a recipient of the Wright Brothers Master Pilot Award for 50 years of safe flights.

However, the AP has noted a rather long list of other achievements over Lawton’s long life – which included involvement in developing Lacrosse guided missile systems, collecting snowflakes in flight during lake-effect snowstorms in Buffalo and initiating avalanches by dropping explosives in the Italian Alps. In fact, Lawton led a 1968 research team that created the Skadi – an electronic rescue beacon to locate avalanche victims.

The FAA’s Buffalo approach control in New York had signed off on the flight plan, but as of today, there is no word whether the weather cooperated and allowed Lawton to do the flight on Monday.

GolfHotelWhiskey.com - John Lawton poses by his Cessna 172

AP Photo/Tony Dejak

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

Matthew Stibbe
Matthew Stibbe is CEO of Articulate Marketing and Turbine, the easy, online way to deal with office paperwork. He has an FAA CPL/IR and an EASA PPL/IR and sometimes flies a Cirrus SR-22. He also writes about wine at Vincarta and being a better manager at Geek Boss.
Bureaucracy must die eBook
Subscribe via RSS

Recent Posts

  • IATA Airport Abbreviations
  • Upcoming Concorde and Apollo documentaries
  • Lie Back And Think Of England: London To Austin On BA’s New 787 Dreamliner
  • Video: Parachuting from the edge of space
  • Hilarious preflight safety video for GA aircraft
  • San Francisco Airport at night – beautiful time lapse video
  • A practical jetpack (finally) takes off
  • A man in a hot air balloon realises he is lost
  • Pegasus House: The former HQ of the Bristol Aeroplane Company is restored
  • Vintage British aviation posters from the 1920-1930s

Copyright © 2023 Golf Hotel Whiskey. All rights reserved.