As corporate pilots Tom and Pam Clements climbed the stone steps at the forbidding Angkor Wat temples in Cambodia, it seemed incredible that they were being paid to go on this “vacation.” Though the Clements had paid the incremental cost of accompanying their passengers on various sightseeing tours, the husband and wife team had still turned a small profit flying their passengers on a three-month, eastbound journey from Scottsdale, Ariz., nearly around the world to Honolulu in a King Air. The trip, a culmination of more than 18 months of planning, began less than a month after September 11.
Neither pilot was a stranger to the King Air. An instructor pilot for Beechcraft in the 1970s, Tom logged thousands of hours in various King Air models, including time spent ferrying aircraft across both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and he later started a flight-training company specializing in King Air instruction, which he recently sold to the Scottsdale branch of SimCom. Pam had flown King Airs for a Phoenix-area bank, then worked several years as a demonstration pilot for AlliedSignal, frequently flying King Airs and other aircraft to South America and Europe.
