During the heyday of small-airplane manufacturing in the mid- to late 1970s, factories in Wichita, Lock Haven and Vero Beach built tens of thousands of airplanes, and every one of them somehow had to find its way from the conclusion of the production flight-test process into the hands of an owner or dealer. In some cases, the factory would roll out the red carpet and make a little ceremony of handing over the freshly minted airplane to its owner. Maybe a dealer would send an employee to pick up the order. Sometimes an aviation journalist would deliver a new airplane to a dealer and write about the machine and the trip.
Delivery of small airplanes into the hands of overseas customers presented a higher degree of complication, and a cadre of international ferry pilots sprang up to meet the need. Faced with crossing thousands of miles of open ocean before (they hoped) arriving at an island tech stop, these pilots kept alive the sort of derring-do that shaped the adolescence of aviation in the 1930s. Make no mistake, ferrying a light piston single over the North Atlantic in the pre-GPS 1970s and 1980s took no less guts than the pioneers had summoned when dry land receded behind them 40 and 50 years earlier. The ferry pilots were doing it not for glory or for the record books but simply to make a lonesome living while satisfying the same quest for adventure that drove the pioneers.
