AT 45, Gus McLeod handed over his business to his wife, said goodbye to his kids, jumped into an open-cockpit plane and flew to the North Pole alone.

Dangerous? Perhaps for most. Scary? Even for him. However, the former field operator with America's Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had decades of flying experience. He assessed the risks, decided they were manageable and successfully made an historic solo flight to the North Pole.

Today, at 48, his is a life of numerous accomplishments - he has worked on missiles and military submarines, holds an honorary membership in the Tuskegee Airmen, a medal of distinction from the Air Force Association, Congressional Recognition and received the Aviation Pioneer Award from the Black Pilots of America.

The world-renowned aviator and explorer shared many of his adventures as part of the Bermuda Underwater Exploration Institute's Explorer Lecture Series this week, and found time to sit and discuss bits of his life with photographer TONY CORDEIRO and reporter HEATHER WOOD.

Q: Where are you from?

A: I was born and raised in Mississippi. The most obvious thing about me is the horrible accent. Unfortunately. I haven't mastered the king's English like you Bermudians.

Q: Did you always want to fly?

A: Everyone has an idea of what they should do in life. My idea, since I was an infant, was that I wanted to fly. When I was growing up in Mississippi, one of the home-town heroes was an aviator from the golden age of aviation. He used to race airplanes, he used to fly around with a lion club in the airplane and do all kinds of wild stuff.

He was my hero. I knew the guy and I used to listen to his stories of derring-do and when men were men and women liked it. I learned how at the age of 14 and even paid my way through college as a pilot doing crop dusting and ferrying airplanes.

People would buy planes in Europe but then didn't have the wherewithal to bring them over themselves. So they would hire someone young and stupid like me, to fly them (back to the States). Since then I've flown from the United States as far away as South Africa although that wasn't anything compared to (my journey) to the North Pole in an open-cockpit plane.

Q: And of course, you then got a job as a pilot?

A: Not at all. It was unfortunate that when I graduated from university, the Vietnam War was just ending and there were no pilot slots available in either the military or with the commercial airlines. They had so many already; no one was hiring. I decided to return to school and obtained my Master's degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Maryland College Park.

Q: Is that how you ended up working for the CIA?

A: It was while I was doing my Master's that I was recruited as an agent. I can't talk about what I did for the CIA except to say that I worked as an undercover agent for eight years although as of last year, I still was not an official employee.

Wherever I went, I wasn't there. I wasn't anything like (Ian Fleming's character) James Bond although I was a field operator; I was on the sharp end of the stick; I was out there where things were happening. (My memories of the experience are) sensitive and embarrassing.

It's not something I even like thinking about, the stuff I did. I led a different life. It was a job. The only thing I can say it did for me, is that I have a natural wanderlust that needs to be satiated, and it helped with that. I'm just curious about everything and so it was a good outlet for that because it allowed me to travel a lot, to see a lot of places. It filled my interest.

Q: And then one day you woke up and said, "I'm going to make a solo trek to the North Pole", and your wife and family said what a great idea?

A: Not exactly. Four years ago, I decided that I wanted to make my mark in something I'd always wanted to be - a pilot. I decided I wanted to pursue that for me. I wanted to convince myself that I was the pilot that I thought I was.

My maternal grandmother was a Native American and for the first five years of my life, I lived on the reservation with her. The Choctaw (Indian tribe) have a saying: "In order to find yourself, you need a test."

The test has to test you fully and only through the test will you find yourself. I'd left the CIA and bought a medical supply company. I gave the business to my wife, Mary, and said, "I'm outta here." I owned an open-cockpit airplane at the time and I told her, "I don't know what I'm doing, but I'm out of here for a couple of years." It went over like a lead brick.

Q: Why did you think it was so important that you make this journey? Especially since, let's be realistic, it could have killed you?

A: I believe that (each person) comes to a point in life where they have to define themselves. It actually started out as sort of a spiritual quest for me. Being American, and being an American of colour, you sometimes get baggage that you don't necessarily need or want and you have to try to define yourself in a place that doesn't necessarily see you as how you see you.

And I was looking to define me. At the ripe old age of 45, I was faced with a question: Who am I? I'd been defined all my life by one trend or another, but I decided I wanted to find myself. I think everyone should pursue their passions and I guess in pursuing your passion, you probably find yourself.

I look back on it now and wonder why I didn't find myself all along. The answers were so simple but I made them so complicated. But I guess, as humans, we try to reflect the environment and the political climate around us and in doing that sometimes we lose ourselves.

However, the North Pole thing only came about because I was out flying one day. It was 14 degrees out and when I landed, I was all bundled up and somebody said, "You're nuts, it's too cold to fly that thing."

And I said I could go anywhere on the planet in this thing if I wanted to. I could even go to the North Pole. And then I started thinking. The guy laughed it off but I decided it sounded like a doer. I thought, I think I can do that.

And after looking into it, I found it had been attempted before but nobody had ever successfully done it. And I couldn't ask the guys who attempted it because they never found their bodies. So I couldn't ask them how they'd messed up. That was unfortunate. I wish I could've done that.

Q: Despite the previous problems, you decided to continue on to the North Pole anyway?

A: Actually, it was a two-year thing. The first year I got in the airplane not knowing what to expect and just went north figuring that if it breaks I'll just fix it. I'll just go north until it won't run any more and then that'll be the spot where I'll either figure out what's wrong with (the plane) or something will happen.

It was a disaster that year but I did make a record. I managed to fly to the North Magnetic Pole - the spot where all compasses point.

Nobody had ever been that far north in an open-cockpit airplane. The flight almost killed me. I came within seconds of dying. I was out over Hudson Bay, flying through a blizzard, when the engine quit, the water was open and I was going in.

I sat there (hovering over the cold water in the plane). I decided that when I got to 50 feet, I was going to pull up and hammer it in and make it (a quick death). Dying would be kind of painful in that cold water. The engine started again at 600 feet.

Thank God it didn't start at 49 because I'd be dead. It puttered and skipped and hummed and I made it to a little village. When I landed an Inuit came up to me and said, "I've never seen an airplane like that."

I jumped out, picked him up, kissed him on the mouth. The Inuit people adopted me having figured that anybody who made it that far north in that airplane had to be reincarnated an Inuit, or had to have been an Inuit at one time. And so they gave me this name, (which in Inuit means) Tough Walrus, and I spent two months there learning how to survive in the Arctic. It turned out to be a useful accident.

Q: You almost died, and then went back for an even longer journey?

A: Risk assessment is a very difficult thing. Everyone takes risks. It's (when people don't understand) the risk that (they tend to view the person doing it as) crazy and by that definition, I would agree (with people who say I'm crazy).

Crazy, by definition, means not normal. I can't think that (what I've done) would be considered the norm by any standard. It just doesn't fit. It's not normal, it's outrageous. But I do what I do because I'm good at it; because I've assessed the risks and thought they were manageable.

I'm the best pilot I know and I say that because it's why I was able to do (what I've done). I've (always told) my wife that if I die doing something I love doing, it's a worthwhile event for me because I'm into the quality rather than the quantity of life.

Granted there were times there when things happened that I didn't foresee, but that was always a probability. I look at some things that other people do and say, "My gosh I'd never do that. That's too risky for me."

I mean, I look at people the way they party and I say I couldn't do that, I wouldn't want to sacrifice my health. But they do that and they don't see that as risky behaviour. So risk is how you assess it. One man's risk is another man's enjoyment.

So after the (journey to the Magnetic North Pole) I said, "You know with a little bit of planning and what I learned from this I'll be able to go the rest of the way." I went back to the States, got my money together and told my wife what I was going to do. I decided I was going to try to go to the North Pole and National Geographic decided they were going to come along.

Q: Would you do it again?

A: No. I don't even want to think about doing it again. It was 17 days of sheer, agonising hell. (Maintaining) the engine was actually the easiest. Me, that was a hard equation to solve. The airplane was designed to operate at no colder than 20 degrees and I had to operate it at minus 50.

It was a trip made possible by duct tape. I covered the engine totally and the further I went north, I covered it with more and more duct tape. How to make me survive was the trickiest part of it.

Q: You said the idea was to find yourself. Did you?

A: I really did find me. There's no doubt. It was a trip that I would not want to have missed. You spend so much time alone with yourself under excruciating circumstances that you finally meet you. And I came to grips with who I was.

A lot of things happened on that trip that I'd visualised as a youth. I don't know if it's because of foresight that you visualise that stuff (as a child) or there's actually some sort of connection. I don't like to think that there's a connection because I'm an engineer and a heathen by inclination.

The legend of the Sundance (Indian) is really true. It says that if you take your body to the extreme, where you're beyond the point of enduring all pain, that your body fades away and your mind takes a hike and you become free.

Your spirit becomes free to see everything as it is and it really does happen that way. You suffer to the point that you can't stand it any more and then you cease to care. The pain is still there but it's like it doesn't matter and suddenly you get these moments of clarity that are just frighteningly clear.

And those moments were what scared me most on the trip, not the danger of it all. I had some points in there where the hallucinations were so real that they were more real than reality.

It leaves you confused as to what is real and then you reach the point where you'd rather have the hallucinations because the senses (that you experience) are clearer. I could smell things (that were part of my hallucinations that) actually smelled more real than what was reality. That's scary.

Q: How scary did the hallucinations get?

A: The scariest point for me was when the plane finally went down - because of bad fuel that the Canadians sold us. The pilots who rescued me said, "Thank God you're finished with this because we didn't think you were going to survive."

The pilot said, "I thought you were going to get lost and not come back" and the co-pilot said, "I thought you were going to freeze to death and crash." And I looked at them and asked: Who won? But they were real. I'd thought maybe I was dead and they were going to tell me which one of them won the bet so I was asking: How did I die? Which one of them happened?

It was most frightening to me after the fact because it meant that I'd crossed that line of reality but if (I can get my mind) past that one moment, (the trip) was a neat experience.

Q: What's next?

A: My next trip is an engineering challenge, not a physical challenge. I leave December 17 - the 99th anniversary of (Wilbur and Orville) Wright's flight. I'm going to fly an antique airplane from the North Pole to the South Pole while doing history, geography and climate lectures to children across the United States and everywhere else.

I'm going to have a live satellite feed - video and audio - all the way around the planet and while I'm sitting in the cockpit, we're gonna do some classes. The kids will ask questions and then, at each stop, I'm going to have a classroom and we're going to talk about the environment and how it connects to the last place we were at and the history and political (state) of the area. It should take about four months.

Q: Is your family one big group of daredevils?

A: My wife isn't that way at all. Turning over the business to her was the best thing I could have done. She's so much better at it than I was because she actually likes it. I thought it was the worst thing man ever created. I have three children - Gus (23), Hera (21) and Lara (ten). My son's in India, Hera's in South Africa and as Lara is ten, she can only sit back and wonder. She's the only one who wants to fly, the older two see flying as transportation and that's it.

Q: What have you learned, if anything, from your experiences?

A: What I've learned, one thing I've learned is that motivation is part of human nature. We all are motivated. It's just a matter of what we're motivated to do. Some of us use what I call reverse motivation. We think that what we should do is set a task that's difficult and we'll find ourselves or we'll be good at doing something that we thought was difficult.

But the opposite is true. We're successful at things we like, because we like doing them and being human, we'll do whatever it takes to do it. I tell kids, if you want to go to that party, you'll go even if you have to propel yourselves with your tongues no matter what obstacle you come across.

So it's just a matter of what you're motivated to do. Sometimes, here lately, western society has told us that these are the things we have to do and we do them whether we like them or not and when we don't like them and we do them poorly, we ask what we can do to motivate ourselves to do them better. I say, do something else.

Q: What do you do when you want to relax or have fun?

A: Fun? I have fun all the time. I'm always on holiday. Holiday is a constant state with me. That's the one thing that's changed in my life. Holiday is every day. I don't do it unless it's fun any more.