I Never Really Flew Alone

January is the time of year is when we all look forward, not back, but I hope you’ll indulge me for few moments as I turn my gaze around one hundred and eighty degrees and check out my “six.” Cessna/Piper Flyers has been around for fifteen years as of this month and like all anniversaries, it makes me think of the past a little more than usual.

I think I have been writing for these magazines, off and on, almost as long as they have been in existence and my time there has been the most enjoyable and fulfilling of any writing gig I have ever had. You just won’t find a nicer group of people than Jennifer, Kent, Heather, and all the others that make all this possible. You have read my stuff and know that it takes a special group of people to put up with me and my kind of writing.

These people are friends.

As I continue to gaze backward into the depths of my aviation and writing career it occurs to me that my upbringing in both businesses has been stuffed with friends, mentors, helpers and generally nice people. You won’t find a pilot who has been more of a self-made-person than me. I used to pride myself on the fact that nobody paid a cent to help me with my flight training, college or my developing writing career.

For example, the first formal ground-school I ever attended was at my airline after they hired me to be a pilot. I had taught ground schools, but had never taken one. Books were cheap when I was a kid wanting to fly. I read them, studied them, and then took FAA written exams.

I paid for my flight lessons by working at various jobs, starting when I was fourteen. By sixteen, I was working at the airport as a lineboy and with the employee discount, I could buy a half-hour of dual every couple of weeks. 

I could go on with this schmaltzy, Horatio Alger like story of a “boy who worked hard and made it on his own,” but it isn’t true. I did not, ever, do it on my own. I had friends who helped me, pushed me and loved me into the career of my dreams. There is none of my do-it-myself myth that I could have done without enormous amounts of help from others.

The reason I did not need to go to formal ground-school was because of the thousands of hours I sat around the airport when I was a kid, talking flying with the patient people and friends who would put up with all my questions and incessant chatter about airplanes. I learned more from an hour with a local Twin Beech cargo pilot or a tired but patient A&P than I could have learned in a dozen hours of classroom time.

Talk about friends — I sometimes wish I could go back and spend a few hundred more hours with the guys I hung out with at the airport when I was a kid. We spent our young lives talking airplanes, cleaning airplanes, towing airplanes, fueling, re-oiling, pushing, vacuuming out, windshield cleaning, and bathroom dumping various airplanes. I can say with pride that there is not a single disgusting job having to do with airplanes that I have not done.

You can’t appreciate flying captain on a Boeing 767 until you have cleaned out the bathroom of a Cessna 411 with its trash-bag-based lavatory system. Sitting it the cockpit of a 727 at O’Hare in winter waiting to push-back was much more luxurious to me because I had spent years with my friends outside on ramps, hot and cold, doing the scut work that makes aviation possible.

I can’t speak for my old ramp friends, but I absolutely loved it. All of it. I enjoyed complaining about being cold, or wet, or tired. A bad day on the ramp was better than any good day in any other non-aviation job I could think of. It was all great because I was surrounded by friends of mine that were almost as into aviation as I was.

My up by my own bootstraps story is full examples of people helping me when they had no real reason to do so. I am thinking now of Harry Marpole, an instructor working at Lakeland Flying Service, who spent two of his days off teaching me my commercial maneuvers, all at no charge. I remember Shawnee Lander, a hippy-dippy kind of guy who saw enough in me to sign me off for my CFI when I was a sweaty nineteen-year-old know-it-all lineboy with no future and no money.

You want to talk friends? How about George Warren? A Vietnam helicopter combat vet who had no real reason to hire me for his one airplane flying school when I was a not so experienced CFI trying to get though my college education at Florida State University. George worked with me to get my instrument rating, again at no charge, just because he was a good guy and saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself. 

It turned out that you needed an instrument rating to be an airline pilot. George should have been an airline pilot instead of me, but getting hired by an airline was (and still is) all about timing and luck. His help pushed me along to a career that he deserved, but I got.

Another person deserves a lot of of thanks for his friendship here. Warren White, owned and operated Trans Air in Tallahassee and he gave me my first flying job that included operating airplanes bigger than a Cessna 150. It was at Trans Air that I got to fly twins, charters, banners, turtle surveys, forestry and other general aviation missions to build my time up to an airline worthy level.

Warren helped train me and make me a good pilot by giving me access to all kinds of professional flying. Then, when I became a good pilot, the airline hired me and I scooted away in a flash. By the time Delta hired me, Warren White had sanded and polished off some of the weather cowardice and low standards I had been guilty of as I grew up. 

I was in my early twenties when the airline hired me, but I was an old man in terms of aviation experience and wisdom thanks to the opportunities Warren and George gave me.

I never would have gotten through my first few months as an airline pilot if it hadn’t been for various roommates and friends at Delta who helped me along. It still boggles my mind to think back on the patience they showed me as I foundered though my 727 flight engineer training and initial experience. Talk about friends — I flew with hundreds of my best friends at Delta.

When I retired, and moved over to being a mostly general aviation pilot and writer once again my friends in that area welcomed me back and reminded me of why I loved flying — any kind of flying — so much. It turned out that I had not changed much from that sweaty, but sincere line boy. Sitting around hangars and flight school pilot lounges is my comfort zone. My best friends are still out at the airport, in the sky and are reading this magazine column right now.

We are not friends in the sense that you call me every week to see how I am and I doubt that you got a holiday card from me or a note on your birthday. We are friends because I am willing to bet that if we meet on an airport ramp somewhere or at next year’s gathering we will have lots of things to talk about and we will enjoy each other’s company.

I will steal a line from Bogart here and say that the fifteen years of writing about flying with my friends here at Cessna/Piper Flyer has been the beginning of a beautiful friendship.