Peter Garrison

Who is Peter Garrison?

Peter Garrison is an American journalist and amateur aircraft designer/builder. He was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1943, and received a BA in English from Harvard College in 1965.

In 1968–1973, while living in Tarzana, California, he designed and built an all-metal, two-seat, single-engine low-wing monoplane. The design was influenced by the T-18 of John Thorp and the PL-2 of Ladislao Pazmany, both California airplane designer/builders. Garrison called the plane Melmoth after an 1820 Gothic novel, Melmoth the Wanderer. It was notable for unusually long range and for Mr. Garrison's lack of academic qualifications for designing it. With his companion, television documentary producer Nancy Salter, Mr. Garrison used the aircraft to fly to Europe, Japan and South America. The 1976 Pacific crossing was the first nonstop flight from the United States to Japan by a homebuilt aircraft.

In 1981 he began design work on an enlarged fuselage for Melmoth. In 1982, however, the original airplane was destroyed at Orange County Airport when a landing Cessna collided with it. The completely redesigned Melmoth 2 first flew in 2002.