How one 89-year-old pilot flew a single-engine plane from Portugal to Newfoundland

Garrett Barry catches up with the two seniors who set out to fly across the Atlantic together while raising money for a good cause along the way.

A group organizing a five-week, transatlantic fundraiser for polio suppression believes one of their pilots has set a new world record in the process.

The team behind Flight to End Polio says 89-year-old Ed Galkin has become the oldest pilot to finish a transatlantic route in a single-engine aircraft. Galkin and co-pilot Peter Teahen flew from the Azores region in Portugal to St. John’s, N.L., on Wednesday.

“I have a passion for flying,” Galkin said Thursday morning, during a stopover in St. John’s. “It’s great being up here. It’s a big ocean, and a lot of the problems that you think you have, you don’t really have.”

Organizers said the record must now be verified by Guinness World Records for entry into their database. That process will take several weeks.

Galkin and his teammate-turned-friend Teahen have just a few flights left before they complete their journey and return home to New Jersey. The 37-day trip has raised tens of thousands of dollars for Rotary International’s polio vaccination program.

“I’ve been to the hospitals and lifted children up who are suffering in the hospital with polio,” Teahan said. “We’ve seen the horror of polio and the ugliness of it, but we’ve seen the greatness of Rotary and all these other organizations, united together to end polio.”

It’s Teahan’s second trip of this kind: In 2023, he and John Ockenfels circumnavigated the globe, raising more than $2 million in polio vaccine funding.

For this trip, Teahan said, the Flight to End Polio group set a goal of $1 million, and he believes they’re on their way towards breaking that target.

The donations are being matched on a two-to-one basis by the Gates Foundation, Teahan said.

Galkin is a veteran pilot of his own right. Rotary International said he previously set a record in 2022 when he piloted an Alzheimer’s fundraiser and travelled around the world in his Cessna 210, a single-engine aircraft. It’s the same plane Teahan and Galkin are using this time.

The pair hadn’t spent much time together before starting their journey in August, only a few phone calls and meetings, before jumping in the small aircraft for five weeks straight.

“We definitely didn’t have too much difficulty handling each other,” Galkin said.

“We’ve never been at a loss of words about what to talk about or tell jokes about,” Teahen added. “Sometimes I get irritable and sometimes he gets irritable, and usually within minutes we’re off talking about something else.”

Their trip has seen the duo stop in France, Spain, Denmark, Poland, Norway and Portugal, along with other destinations. Their longest passage was their most recent, taking roughly ten hours to fly from the Azores to St. John’s.

“The weather was pretty good. We had maybe two hours of moderate turbulence and a little bit of rain, but pretty much the trip was a normal routine flight for us,” Galkin said.

“We were happy.”