With 29 world speed records under his belt, Lacy’s name has appeared in many newspaper headlines and aviation record books. On September 19, 1962, in California’s Mojave Desert, Lacy and fellow Air National Guard pilot
Jack Conroy attracted national attention when they made the first flight of the
Pregnant Guppy, a Boeing 377 Stratocruiser modified to carry the Saturn rocket booster in support of the U.S. space program. The aircraft carried its first payload for
NASA to
Cape Canaveral one year later. On June 8, 1966, Lacy piloted a Learjet 23 owned by
Frank Sinatra. Earlier that day, he flew Sinatra and
Dean Martin from
Burbank to
Palm Springs before flying out near
Edwards Air Force Base to film a formation flight of five aircraft, including one of the two
XB-70 Valkyries. The flight, intended as a promotional shoot for
General Electric, ended in disaster when an
F-104 collided with the XB-70, resulting in the loss of both aircraft and deaths of F-104 pilot
Joe Walker and XB-70 co-pilot Major Carl Cross. In 1973, Lacy and fellow United Airlines pilot William Arnott made aviation and education history by organizing an around-the-world flight in a chartered United Airlines DC-8 jetliner for aeronautical students from
Mount San Antonio College located in
Walnut, California. Two years later, in 1975, Lacy and the same crew flew students on an eight-day South American sojourn. These tour flights, named “Classroom in the Sky”, pioneered the concept of education from a jet plane. One of Lacy’s most notable achievements was setting a new around-the-world speed record in 1988 with his 36-hour, 54-minute, 15-second flight in a
Boeing 747SP called "
Friendship One". With U.S. astronaut and Apollo 11 commander
Neil Armstrong on board as guest of honor, along with other aviation notables and celebrities, this record-breaking flight raised $530,000 for children’s charities worldwide. Lacy and his wife Lois, along with long-time friends
Bruce McCaw and
Joe Clark, organized the flight, which averaged over 623 miles per hour and topped the previous record by 112 miles per hour. In 1995, Lacy was one of the first aircraft owners to equip his Gulfstream jets with
Blended Winglet™ technology developed by
Aviation Partners Inc., founded by Joe Clark and Dennis Washington. That June, in a Gulfstream IISP inscribed with the words “Wings of Change” across its side, Lacy and Clark set world speed records during a flight from Los Angeles to Paris. The flight culminated with display of the jet at the Paris Air Show. On the way home, they also established a world speed record from Moscow to Los Angeles. Lacy and Clark set yet another speed record in the Gulfstream IISP in 2003 on a flight from Los Angeles to
Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. During Lacy’s 1999 "Midway 2000" flight to celebrate the New Year, he and 40 guests traveled over the Pacific Ocean to be among the first to enter the new millennium. Lacy piloted his Boeing 727 from Southern California by way of Hawaii and
Midway Island to the
International Dateline. Cruising just one-tenth of a mile west of the imaginary line where every day officially begins, the passengers then passed into January 1, 2000, while it was still 4 a.m. on December 31, 1999, on the West Coast. In a period of one hour, the group traveled through five date changes before celebrating the New Year on the ground in Midway Island 24 hours later. == Honors ==