PART IV. Commercial Aviation

 

Chapter Fifteen

DALLAS LOVE FIELD

 

Come back with me now to those thrilling days when I was still trying to make a living as a pilot. With a hearty, "You are cleared for takeoff and an immediate left turn out." The lone pilot flies again. Back to those days of yesteryear when aviation was still growing up, to the glory days of General Aviation that would never be again.

The first time I landed at Love Field, the terminal building was still on the Lemmon Avenue side and there were some old WW II B-17s parked nearby. The old terminal was torn down when the new terminal was built with an entrance off of Mockingbird Lane on the other side of the airfield.

True or not, I always heard the story that in old Dallas, years before my time, there was a dirt road off of Mockingbird Lane nicknamed Lovers Lane. A new airfield was located near there and thus, the origin of the name. When WW II broke out, Love Field became an aviation staging area. Florene Watson, whom I mentioned in an earlier chapter, was based there as an Army ferry pilot and CO of the Women Army Service Pilots (WASP) unit at Love Field.

Dallas Love Field became a major airport in the 1950s due to the geometric growth of the city of Dallas. The new Love Field terminal was completed in the early 60s and was a modern architectural wonder with marble floors, a five-story rotunda and a three-story balcony overlooking the airline parking ramps.

In the center of the terminal stood a large bronze statue of a Texas Ranger that was moved there from the old Amon Carter Airport terminal in Fort Worth. The inscription on the base read one riot, one ranger. Were it not for Southwest Airline flights, the present terminal would have been abandoned or turned into a civil aviation terminal long ago.

Meacham Field, Fort Worth’s main airport, located north of town, was a thriving General Aviation airport, but had been unable to support airline service over the years. Fort Worth folks had to drive to Dallas Love Field to catch an airliner.

Back in the 1930s, Dallas and Fort Worth began a long running feud, which started over who would get an Exposition, which was finally held at what is now Dallas Fair Park.

The wealthy newspaper publisher of the Fort Worth Star Telegram, Amon Carter, Jr., donated a large tract of land between Dallas and Fort Worth for the purpose of building a regional airport on the Dallas/Tarrant County line. After much negotiation, a deal was cut with Dallas to close Love Field and make Amon Carter the main airport when it was completed.

The fatal blow to the project was dealt when it came time to place the location of the terminal building. Dallas wanted it on the Dallas County side and Fort Worth wanted in on the Tarrant County side of the runways. Amon Carter, Jr. insisted that because he had donated the land, he would be the one to say where the terminal was built.

The terminal was built on the Tarrant County side and the social war from the 1930s once again reared its ugly head. The Dallas airline clientele refused to drive to the new Amon Carter Airport and Love Field continued to grow.

To complicate the problem, most carriers had already signed gate lease agreements with Amon Carter. The large prop airliners like the Douglas DC-6 and the Lockheed Constellation would land at Amon Carter Airport to pickup and deplane the Fort Worth passengers. They would takeoff, cruising at 1,000 feet AGL for an immediate landing at Love Field where they would deplane and pickup the Dallas passengers. We lived in the Mid-Cities at the time, so the airliners went right over our house.

If you have ever wondered or questioned why the new DFW Regional Airport terminal buildings all face inward to the center of the airport, well that’s the county line. And now you know the rest of the story.

Central Airline

Braniff Airlines was based at Love Field. American Airlines had started in Fort Worth years earlier, but had moved away. There were two other carriers who served the region, Trans Texas Airways (TTA) affectionately referred to by the local gentry as Tree Top Airways and Central Airlines.

Shortly after I got out of the military, Central Airlines was hiring copilots for their DC-3 runs. Their offices were located at the entrance to Amon Carter Airport. I interviewed with the Chief Pilot and was tentatively hired for the next class for copilot training.

Ozark Airlines was Central Airline’s main competitor and was fairing better financially than Central. Before the next pilot class started, Ozark bought out Central and took over all of Central’s routes. Ozark was flying mostly twin-engine Convair equipment and had a surplus of DC-3 pilots. Needless to say, the DC-3 copilot’s class never convened.

After all of the airline carriers moved their operations to Dallas Love Field, Amon Carter airfield was renamed Greater Southwest Airport.

Mustang Aviation

Mustang Aviation was the FBO in the large blue hanger at the far-east end of Love Field beside the Delta Airline hanger, across the street from the Coke plant. With no flying job on the horizon, I went to work as a design draftsman for a small research company on Mockingbird Lane down the street from Mustang Aviation and would stop by on my lunch hour.

A fellow by the name of Hoover partnered with Toots Womack in the Mustang operation. Toots was an old time pilot and one of the original Quiet Birdmen. The Quiet Birdmen was formed by early aviation to aid the widows and orphans of downed flyers. Toots had this mischievous pet parrot that had free rein of the hanger offices and would chase you like a dog down the hall.

Hoover claimed to be the heir to the vacuum cleaner fortune. Whether true or not, the best quote I can attribute to Hoover was, "I know there’s a lot of money in the aviation business because I put a bunch of it there".

Hoover talked Bob Smith, of Aerosmith Aviation, into letting him have the Piper dealership on Love field. Hoover's main operation was running an air taxi service and he flew a lot of the twin-engine flights himself. All the brand new Piper single-engine models sat around mostly unused. So I talked Hoover into letting me fly some air taxi runs in the singles on the weekend. Most of the runs were delivering oil well parts to some Podunk airport out in the West Texas oilfields.

Air Taxi Arrow

The other air taxi pilot that flew for Hoover flew copilot in the twins because many exec’s insurance required two pilots. He was assigned to check me out in the new retractable Piper Arrow. I don’t think he had flown the Arrow very much because it was brand new. After a short checkout, we returned to Love Field to land. He placed the gear lever in the down position, I assume to show me how it was done, but the three green lights on the instrument sub-panel did not come on.

He panicked and said we were going to have to make a wheels-up landing. Trying not to be too bold, I suggested that we hold off doing that for a while and let’s climb on out and fly around a little bit. We had plenty of fuel. In fact, our tanks were nearly full and we didn’t need to do a wheels-up landing with all that fuel onboard.

I reached in the glove box to get the aircraft manual and began to thumb through the pages. Actually, I was looking for the circuit breaker locations. It was then that I noticed the instrument panel lights were on. I turned the panel lights to off and suggested we slow down and lower the gear again. Sure enough, all three lights came on. They had been on all the time, but not bright enough to see in the sunlight.

Airplane Rental

Student pilots were not allowed to depart or make landings at Love Field. This was probably some type of city ordinance and not an FAA regulation. Private pilots could, however, fly out of Love Field and there sat all those new Piper single-engine aircraft that were not being used.

I asked Hoover if he’d put insurance coverage on the aircraft for rentals, which didn't cost much as they were already insured for air taxi use. I began checking people out in the various Cherokee models and the weekend rental business exploded. Why wouldn’t it, with brand new airplanes to fly?

Hoover eventually got out of the Piper dealership business and turned it back over to Aerosmith. I preferred not to sit around and write gas tickets so I left when the planes did. This experience stuck in my mind and influenced my thinking on what type of aircraft to rent, if I were to operate an FBO.

Capital Aviation

The old Cessna distributorships, like the original Ford automobile distributorships, were independently owned before Cessna Aircraft Corporation began to buy them all up. The independent Cessna distributorships were operated a little like a squadron, complete with CO and Exec.

Capital Aviation, owned by Ragsdale Aviation in Austin, based its Cessna distributorship at Dallas Love Field. The late 1960s and early 70s were the heyday of general aviation. The Capital Aviation Cessna distributorship was moving six hundred plus new Cessna aircraft a year. A large number of the pre-owned light planes on the market today were built during this era.

Several young pilots, like myself, volunteered regularly to ferry aircraft from the Cessna factory to Dallas. It was a good way to log free flight time and get to fly new models. Cessna introduced a new learn-to-fly program called Discover Flying and Capital Aviation hired me full time to promote the new program.

Robert, the senior sales rep for Capital, was assigned to show me the ropes and taught me what everyday light airplane flying was all about. The first day I showed up at Love Field to go to work for Capital, Robert said we were going to fly down to San Angelo and told me to get a new Cessna 150 out of the nearby hanger. We were walking to the airplane before I had a chance to have a second cup of coffee.

In rapid succession, I asked, “Where are the charts? Do we want to file a VFR flight plan? What's the weather enroute?”

He answered, “The weather’s fine, look at the sky.”

I taxied out and took off. “Where are we going again?”

“Head up to the east side of Lake Belton and then turn southwest.” That was the closest thing I got to any flight instructions. Kick the tires, crank the engine and look out the window. That was Robert’s way of flying. His instructions were simple, but concise in that they avoided the restricted airspace over Fort Hood. I had been introduced to driving a light plane to work like most people drive their cars to work everyday.

The Discover Flying Cessna was nothing more than one of the new slant-tail Cessna 150s with a wild orange and turquoise paint job and a bursting sun logo on the tail.

For the next year or so, I flew around Texas in a small Cessna Skyhawk when I could get one and a 150 when I couldn’t. Bob always took the Skylane demo. Ebor, our ol’ ex-Navy WW II pilot boss, wouldn’t let us fly the twins. I landed at every local airport on the chart and tried to sign the operator up to buy a Cessna 150 and a Skyhawk, which qualified them as a Discover Flying Center. I also made every air show and fly-in in the region with the brightly painted Discover Flying 150.

Cessna Wichita

Cessna Aircraft Corporation in Wichita, Kansas, held a big sales meeting for all the Cessna distributors to introduce the new Discover Flying program. The guest speaker for the event was Paul Harvey. Being a Paul Harvey fan, I positioned myself to sit at his table in order to visit with him during the banquet.

Most of the conversation was about whether or not Nixon would resign the presidency. I asked Mr. Harvey what he thought the outcome would be.

He replied, “He will resign, the press will get him.”

Those words were spoken a year before Nixon did resign. I did not think he would resign and suspected Mr. Harvey was not anti-Nixon, but amazed at his ability to predict the outcome.

The conversation took a lull, as it sometimes does, just as I made a comment about the prime rib that had been served. It was a little too rare for my liking and I said, “Back in Texas I saw a dead cow on the highway hurt worse than this steak.”

Unbeknownst to me, the tall gentleman seated at our table was the president of Cessna. When he got up to introduce Mr. Harvey, he began by saying, “I think that everyone enjoyed their dinner this evening,” and then looking straight at me, he added, “except maybe a few from Texas,” and everyone had a good laugh.

Garland Airport

Returning from Wichita in Ragsdale’s Cessna 401, he offered to drop me off at Garland Airport. We had a Discover Flying Center at Garland and it was closer to where I lived than Love Field. I was in the right seat and Ragsdale was talking to me the whole time. Ragsdale commented that he hadn’t landed at Garland in years and so when we got closer, I pointed the runway out to him.

The old Garland Airport used to sit out in the open surrounded by pastures. LBJ Freeway was under construction and was cutting off the north end of the runway and apartments were encroaching on the airport.

Ragsdale, now in his late middle age, was a man who flew an airplane almost everyday of his adult life. He never moved forward in his seat. He sat there, leaned back comfortably and put that 401 on the numbers.

About that time I realized what being a pilot was all about. A pilot really never gets good until he flies everyday. Ragsdale taught me a lot about the aviation business. His philosophy was to sell something everyday and it didn’t matter if it was a cylinder head gasket or an airplane. Sell something.

Garland Airport was where a fellow by the name of Brussard, a self-ordained minister, used to land his P-51 and P-38. He owned his own church on an airport up near Paris, Texas and his hobby was restoring old WW II aircraft. Brussard had quite a personal collection of flyable war birds. The first summer of the Discover Flying program, I put together an air show and fly-in at the Garland Airport with all the new Cessna models on display. Brussard flew in with his own small air force and put on a one-man air show, flying one aircraft after another.

We also ferried and stored some of the new Cessna planes at Garland Airport. This was convenient for me as I only lived a couple of miles from the airport. By calling the Universal Airport Communications (UNICOM) at Garland, they would give my wife a ring on the landline to come and pick me up.

If the airport was closed, I had a UNICOM receiver at the house, which she’d keep on when she knew I was flying in late. I would call Flying A Ranch inbound, a made-up place, for landing advisory. She would be out to pick me up in her VW Beetle by the time I had my Cessna pushed into the T-hanger.

An old AF pilot, the bookkeeper at Capital Aviation, was bringing in a new Skylane from Wichita and I was waiting for him at the Garland Airport to take him back to Love Field. When the factory new Skylane taxied up, I saw that the lower windshield and instrument panel were badly smoked up. The plane had a full electrical failure about 50 miles out.

Wanting to know the details of what happened I asked, “What was the first thing you did when the electrical fire started?”

He said he turned the autopilot off to fly the plane manually and then began to shut everything else down. Suspicions confirmed, all pilots mistrust autopilots. During the first moon landing by Neil Armstrong, he did the same and manually flew the Lunar Lander in for the touchdown.

Night Thunderstorm Flying

Capital Aviation planned a big weekend dealer meeting at Lakeway Inn near Austin to introduce the new Cessna model year. Ebor and I were flying down in the Cessna 310. He was finishing making some phone calls and I was trying to get him going, as I knew there was a storm front moving-in.

Most of the crew had left earlier that afternoon in other aircraft. Ebor was great to work for, but a chain smoker, lived on coffee and antacid tablets having spent way too many years onboard a Navy carrier.

We finally took off from Love Field about dark in the company Cessna 310 twin. I had never flown with him before, but knew him to be an expert pilot. The lightning and black clouds rolled in and it-was-a-dark-and-stormy-night.

“Maybe we ought to file IFR,” I suggested.

“Hell no,” he replied, “They'll just vector us right into one of those damn thunder bumpers.” and he told me to watch for the lightning strikes. As each lightning bolt lit up the clouds ahead, Ebor would turn the plane’s heading twenty degrees to the left or right, an old trick he had learned from many years of over water flying. “You see,” he said, “the most turbulent air is where the static electricity is and the lightning indicates it. Always stay ahead of the squalls.”

The correct term for a thundercloud is cumulonimbus, but a pilot I knew used to call them cumulonymphi because, he said, “They’d screw you every chance they got.”

We landed VFR that night at the resort's private airstrip. Several of the Cessna pilots from Wichita, enroute to the dealer meeting, spent the night in Oklahoma. The only other pilot that came through was a Cessna rep in a model 206 who had filed IFR. He had been a MATS pilot in WW II.

Ragsdale wanted the flashy little Cessna 150 on display at the lodge for the meeting. So early the next morning, Robert taxied the Cessna 150 down the resort’s two-lane main road with me in a golf cart ahead of him waving the cars to the shoulder. We parked the plane on the front lawn of the clubhouse.

Slow Rolls & Negative Gs

Ebor didn't like Robert and I flying together because he thought we ought to be headed different directions and thereby getting more work done. On one occasion, when we did fly together, Robert taught me to slow roll a Cessna 182 Skylane. The only trick to a smooth slow roll I found out was simply not to chicken out on the ailerons.

If the pilot didn't hold the yoke all the way over to the stop in the Skylane, the plane was going to split-S out the bottom of the roll. Not good for the airplane at all and might cause your passengers to have to change their jockey shorts.

A roll was not a good idea in the slower, lighter Cessna 150 and Skyhawk. The vertical stabilizer had been known to collapse in a snap roll on the 150. The Skylane had enough power to easily perform a roll and the following maneuver as well.

The ol' float-the-ballpoint-pen in the cockpit magic trick was the other little stunt that Robert taught me. The trick was to lay a ballpoint pen, the heavier the better, on the top of the instrument panel and float the pen through the air.

This was accomplished by placing the aircraft in a shallow dive, pulling up into a smooth climb and pushing over in a slow ark to obtain a zero gravity (G) condition. In a Skylane, the best speed was about 180 mph. As the airspeed started to playoff, you’d push forward on the control yoke with a steady but smooth motion and the ballpoint pen would float through the cockpit. It was a good idea to make sure your flight case was tied down so it didn’t hit you in the back of the head and your coffee cup was empty.

After a little practice, it was possible to maneuver the pen into the palm of your hand by the amount of forward control pressure. It’s an eerie sight, but impressive when executed properly. You had gotten good when you could put the pen into the palm of your hand without moving your arm to catch the pen.

Boring Holes In The Sky

Coming back into Dallas, the city could be seen long before getting there. At an elevation of only 600 feet, Dallas lay across a wide sprawling plain. Approaching the large city from a distance, it seemed to rise up out of the haze and materialize on the horizon. The glow of Big D’s city lights could be seen a hundred miles out on a clear night.

Up high, the world looked like a rolling roadmap. After hours and hours of boring holes in the sky, I learned that another way to break the monotony was to drop down on the deck and fly low over the countryside.

An interesting, but worthless piece of information I discovered flying over cattle country was that sheep would look up when a plane passed low overhead, cows did not. The only thing I figured out was that lambs were in danger from large birds of prey and the larger calves were not.

On a couple of occasions flying across cattle country, I’d land in a cow pasture for a restroom break. Continuously grazed grasslands were usually fairly smooth for landings and takeoffs, but best to hold the nose wheel off a bit till seeing how rough.

Near Quanah, Texas, there were two large mesa mounds that rose up out of the prairie. The Indians held powwows there and this was how the mesas got the name Medicine Mound. Going in or out of Quanah, I’d drop down and fly between them.

The town of Quanah was named for the half-breed Comanche Indian bandit, Quanah Parker. In his later years, he’d come down from Oklahoma to ride in the 4th of July parade.

We had a single-engine Cessna dealer at the Quanah Airport who sold a couple of new single-engine planes a year to the farmers and ranchers around the area. Based on his annual sales and on the population of his area, a Dallas Cessna dealer would have been selling a couple of thousand aircraft a year to match the same sales percentages.

The small growing community of Runaway Bay, north of Fort Worth, had finished building a new airport and I was always checking out new FBOs for a possible Cessna dealership. Shortly after I landed, the mayor of Bridgeport with a local newspaper photographer arrived to take a picture. My photo standing beside my demo Cessna Skyhawk appeared on the front page of that week’s local newspaper. Turned out that I had the dubious honor of being the first pilot to land on the new airport.

Dallas Love To San Anton

Our executive secretary was an attractive, middle-aged divorced lady who dated a Cessna salesman in San Antonio. On weekends, she’d hitch a ride going south Friday evening. She was a gutsy gal and would fly with most anyone. Robert and I tried to keep on her good side by connecting her up with rides because she approved our expense account reports.

On a Friday evening, she flew with me to Garland Airport where I had a hop lined up for her with one of our young volunteer ferry pilots to San Antonio. Like many of the aircraft stored for a while, the battery on the new Skylane was down. A Cessna 150 was easy to prop, but a six cylinder Skylane was not.

A 150 wouldn't recharge unless there was some juice left in the battery to activate the charging unit. A Skylane did not have the same electrical system and would charge while flying.

Making sure the young pilot had the brakes set good, I gave the prop one heck of a good swing and it started the first time. Good because there wasn’t much chance of starting one by hand after it had been flooded. Pulling the wheel chalk, I stepped aside and waved bye as they taxied out.

Management handled our large multi-engine dealerships at Addison, San Antonio and Houston, not Robert and I. However, Ragsdale was a stockholder in GenAero at San Antonio and we got free remain overnight (RON) service there.

We seldom ever put a hundred hours on a new plane and more than once I sold my demo with an hour’s discount on the spot and caught a ride home. Needing warranty service was a good excuse to RON at GenAero. So when I knew I was going to be in San Antonio, particularly over a weekend, my wife and daughter would ride along with me. Suzie liked to stay at the LaPosada down on the Riverwalk and we’d have dinner in the rotating dining room atop the Hemisphere Space Needle.

I had stopped a GenAero returning to Dallas one afternoon and met up with one of the reps out of the Houston office. Didn’t know him very well, our paths had only crossed on a couple of occasions. He was a young fellow and struck me as a little eccentric. I noticed that he didn’t wear a watch.

To my way of thinking, real pilots wore fancy watches and they were an essential accessory to a pilot's wardrobe. The young pilot argued that if a person was tuned to their metabolic clock, they always knew what time it was within a few minutes. Besides, he added, there was usually a clock on the instrument panel for timed-turns in a holding pattern.

The next day, I took my watch off and have never worn one since. He was right. Once I got used to not wearing a timepiece, I found that I was able to tell the time within a few minutes and always within plus or minus a reasonable tolerance. I tend to mess up a little crossing multiple time zones and when Daylight Savings Time starts or ends. Try it and don’t be afraid to guess, you’ll usually be right.

Departing Dallas Love

The biggest single hazard for light planes at Love Field, particularly after the introduction of heavy jets like the Boeing 747, was getting caught in a wing-tip vortex.

Many private pilots, by dumb luck alone, have never encounter the problem. A pilot had to burn it into his head that it was there and touchdown beyond the heavy's touchdown point and to rotate and climb out prior to where the heavy lifted off.

Sometimes the airliners were lined up ten deep for takeoff at Love Field and the tower would only release them at the rate of one every three minutes back then. The local small aircraft jockeys, like myself, learned to ask for an intersection takeoff with immediate right turn out. This would allow for a departure between the heavy’s takeoff and landing Vortex. Otherwise, you could be waiting in the departure lineup for half an hour.

Love Field enjoyed an amazing safety record through the years. Throughout its entire history, a large aircraft had never crashed into downtown Dallas. Remarkable in that many of the departing flights climb out right over the main downtown area. The Coca Cola bottling plant, located at the northeast edge of Love Field, did experience the occasional close call.

Jerry, a TTA copilot at the time and now a retired captain for Continental Airlines, told me of one such incident. After passing V1 on takeoff and out of runway on a hot summer afternoon, their right engine on his Convair 440 blew a jug.

With Mockingbird Lane and the Coca Cola bottling plant coming up fast, Jerry said, “There was nothing left to do except pull the gear lever up and hope for the best.” Jerry didn't think they cleared the Coke sign on top of the building by more than a foot or two.    

As they turned out over affluent, swimming pool infested, north Dallas part of the engine cowl fell off. They returned to Love Field executing a safe single-engine landing. Jerry said that he read the papers for weeks after that, expecting someone to report finding that engine cowl in the backyard, but he never heard or read a word about the incident.

Before banks had electronic check clearing centers, a person could write a check and it would take three days to get to the bank and clear. There was good money in short haul airmail contracts and flying cancelled checks for the banks. A pilot we all knew, flew the Dallas to Texarkana canceled check run every weeknight in a Cessna 320 based at Love Field.

One morning he didn't return. Searchers found the wreckage in the Piney Woods of East Texas. It appeared as though the plane had been flown into the ground in straight and level flight at cruise speed. The pilot had likely fallen asleep.

A rather odd crash occurred on approch to Dallas Love just to the east of the field when a company Aero Commander, which flew a regular shuttle run between Love Field and their factory at Greenville, fell into a grade school playground in the Highland Park area. Witnesses said that one wing folded upward on the Aero Commander and it dropped straight down.

Normally, the school yard would have been filled with children during that time of the afternoon, except the principal had called a teacher's meeting and school had been let out an hour early that afternoon.

The crash investigation revealed a very significant statistic. Even though the aircraft had only about ten thousand hours of flying time, it had over sixty thousand landing gear cycles because of its short hops. This routine had literally fatigued the wing's main spar until it snapped, kind of like bending a paperclip back and forth until it breaks.

Your Plane Is Waiting

The Love Field terminal had a gate for air taxi and private aircraft, but the terminal gates still used the old air stairs, not the all weather second story gates like they have now. My wife's sister, Nancy, and her first husband, were due in on an airliner at Love Field for a visit.

I called ground control and advised them that I needed to pickup an air taxi passenger that was arriving at the American gate and gave them the parties’ name. I taxied my single-engine Cessna Cardinal up beside their flight as it shut down and waited for the passengers to deplane. Nancy’s husband was suitably impressed when they announced over the airliner PA system that Mr. Phillips’ private aircraft was waiting.

Nancy never cared much for flying, let alone flying in little airplanes like my Cessna, but it was just a short hop from Love Field over to Garland Airport. I sat Nancy in the right seat so she could see out better and when I cut the power to turn final at Garland Airport, she put a permanent scar in my right arm with her fingernails, convinced the engine had quit and the plane was about to fall out of the sky.

Ciudad De Acuna

We had a Cessna dealer in Del Rio, which was at the end of my trip south and due to the distance it was always an RON. It was one the best airports down along the Mexican border and a good place to slip off to and hide out for a couple of days.

We’d go across the border to eat at a Mexican steakhouse that had live entertainment and served large cuts of the best steaks. I enjoyed the music, but my TexMex wasn’t good enough to get the standup comedian’s jokes. He seemed upset when I didn’t laugh so I just pretended to laugh when everyone else did.

Sitting on the porch of the Del Rio airport office one hot afternoon, I leaned back in an old wooden chair and struck up a conversation with a man in bib overhauls sitting beside me. “What do you do?” I asked.

“I’m a sheep rancher,” he replied.

When I inquired as to how many sheep he had, he told me that he owned about nine thousand head and went on to explain how they put a notch in the sheep's ear every year and then sell off the ones with three notches. Making conversation, I asked casually, "What does a sheep sell for these days?"

"They go for $60 to $80 a head, depending on the market."

Doing some quick math in my head, I realized the gentleman leaning back on the porch chair visiting with me had an annual income of a couple hundred thousand dollars a year. Not to mention that this was in days when we were selling new Skyhawk for $7,950. The lesson for that day was don't judge a person by their appearance.

In the wintertime, when the ceiling was low, the best route from Del Rio to San Angelo was straight up the highway. It was helpful to know that there was an oil company radio tower at Eldorado and one more just north of it alongside the highway. In low visibility, the best thing to do was to stay right over the highway because the towers were, of course, off to one side.

On this one particular trip, my brother Don had flown down to Del Rio with me the day before and we were returning via the low ceiling highway route when Don remarked, “It's only 60 miles to San Angelo.”

A little bit amazed at his accuracy, I said, “Yes, that’s about right. How’d you know that?”

“Oh, I read a highway sign back there when we went by.”

Have The Field In Sight

Statistically the weather in and around Dallas produces sunshine during the day 360 of the 365 days a year. Probably true, but morning ground fog was not an unusual occurrence around Love Field.

One early morning, approaching Love Field from the Bachman Lake side, which I had done dozens of times before, I turned to line up with the runway lights and advised the tower, “I have the runway in sight.”

At about 400 feet, my eyes finally focused on the car traffic running up and down what I had mistaken for the active runway. In the fog, the streetlights on Lemmon Avenue gave the illusion of being the runway lights.

Without further hesitation, I executed a quick right and left turn and landed on the main runway. No one was the wiser. Well, except maybe the tower operator who probably saw my landing lights on final and who had asked if I was sure I had the runway in sight.

Braniff Pilot Class

Still thinking about hiring on with the airlines, I continued to build my flight time and in particular, retractable gear time. A captain for American Airlines owned a Bonanza he rented out at the old downtown Grand Prairie Airport. He required anyone who flew the Bonanza to be checked out by him personally before he would let them rent it.

After a brief checkout in the Bonanza, we were visiting about my interest in going to work for one of the major air carriers. He asked how many hours I had and I told him about twelve hundred. He said that I flew as good or better than half the copilots that he flew with everyday so why didn't I just put some P-51 time in my logbook.

Only ever having sat in the cockpit of a P-51, I told him I didn’t know where I’d get the bucks to fly a Mustang.

“You don't understand,” the Captain explained laughing, “I'm referring to a Parker 51 ink pen.”

When hiring time for the next pilot’s class at Braniff Airlines came around, I was number twenty-one for an interview in the chief pilot’s office. As I sat in the waiting room, I struck up a conversation with a young Air Force Lieutenant who had just gotten off active duty as a jet instructor pilot.

They had hired nineteen for a class of twenty and his interview was next before mine. Needless to say, the chief pilot came out after talking to the young Lieutenant and politely told me he had filled the class. So to heck with it, I'd just have to find another way to fulfill this flyers quest for the sky.

As it turned out, looking back on my misplaced ambitions, I probably would have hated the job anyway. Getting up in the middle of the night to meet some oddball flight schedule and sleeping in some strange hotel room wasn't my idea of a pleasant and glamorous life style. Just maybe being an airline captain wasn’t what it was cracked up to be. An airline captain, who was close to retirement, once told me that if it hadn’t been for the high pay, he'd have quit flying the main line long ago.

PART IV. Commercial Aviation

 

Chapter Sixteen

FLIGHT DYNAMICS

 

When Cessna Aircraft Corporation bought out Capital Aviation's Dallas based distributor and the Houston based distributor, they combined the two and moved the headquarters to Houston. Not wishing to relocate to Houston, I left the company.

Bob Smith, the owner and founder of Aerosmith, the Piper distributor, was Cessna's biggest competitor in the Texas market. He hired me the next week to continue doing for Piper what I had been doing for Cessna.

The one condition I placed on my employment was that I would also be able to fly the twin-engine planes, which I had not been able to do with Capital with the exception of the Cessna 337 Push-Pull, which I had flown a couple of times.

Ol' Bubba, one of the pilots who had worked for Smith for a long time, was assigned to check me out in a Twin Aztec for insurance purposes. It was apparent to me from the beginning that Bubba wasn't a real sharp pilot, but I went along cheerfully with the charade. We climbed up to 6,000 feet and he asked me to establish a steep climb at full power.

One didn't have to be a mind reader to know that he was going to pull one of the engines off on me in a full power on climb attitude, so I was prepared.

The object of this maneuver was to see if I could be lulled into losing directional control of the aircraft. If I rolled it over on its side, I’d have failed the flight test. The expected correct procedure was to lower the nose and pull enough power off the good engine to stop the rotation before VMC.

Needless to say, I was way ahead of the aircraft and we returned to Love Field without any additional checkout. As it turned out, one day in the not too distant future, I would save Bubba and myself when he came close to killing the both of us during an instrument approach in a Turbo Navajo.

Navajo Approach

Maurice, a local businessman and self-appointed aviation expert, had made some money in another business and was now an investor in Aerosmith. He was on the board of directors and fancied himself a high-powered efficiency manager. He was always on my ass about one thing or another, but I generally managed to ignore him. His second marriage was to a lady pilot, who was always borrowing one of the company airplanes.

The area northeast of Dallas was often referred to as Thunderstorm Alley during the summer. On a typical summer afternoon, we got a call from Maurice’s wife somewhere in Arkansas that she was weathered-in at some small airport in Aerosmith's Cherokee 235 demo. The weather was VFR in Dallas, but not across the state line in Arkansas.

Bubba and I left in the company Turbo Navajo to pick her up. Somewhere around Texarkana, we went VFR on top and filed for an ADF approach to the Podunk Arkansas airport. Assuming an absence of towers and mountains, the best way to make this type of approach is on a long and slow descent. Close in on the approach, however, never chase the needle on an ADF indicators.

Bubba went after that approach like a kamikaze pilot. Before I knew what was happening, he had us in a hard left bank with every indicator on the panel spinning. He hadn't slowed the Navajo down enough and was chasing the needle.

“Whoa,” I exclaimed and grabbed the yoke to level the wings and eased the nose up. “Let's don't get in such a big hurry about this,” I said as we passed over the airport. “How about we circle back and try this again.”

With Bubba calmed down and the Navajo slowed down, we circled back and got established on the outbound heading to the ADF. With and nailed the approach heading this time, we broke out of the clouds looking down the runway at about 400 feet AGL. We never discussed the incident afterwards.

Cherokee 235

It was still drizzling rain, but the visibility was good and I knew it was VFR to the west. I checked the gas and preflighted the plane. There seemed to be enough gas to make Dallas, so I suggested that Bubba and the lady passenger go on back to Dallas in the Navajo. There was an FBO with fuel at the airport, but they had already closed up and gone home. I took off as the sun was setting. It would be dark before I got back to Dallas and once again I was going to miss my dinner.

Impatient to get home, I set the 235 to maximum cruise power and was cutting down the miles. Hadn’t been a good idea because the engine had been drinking gas at the rate of about twenty-five gallons an hour. As the city lights of Dallas appeared on the horizon, it was a pitch-black night with no moon. I went to economy cruise and ran the right tank dry so as to use it all and the left tank was indicating almost empty.

I decided not to try to make Love Field because if I was going to run out of gas, the best place to do it wasn't over downtown Dallas. Calling Dallas approach, I asked for radar vectors to the nearest airport, which turned out to be White Rock Airport in far east Dallas. The dim lights of the airport were swallowed in the city lights and evening traffic. Dallas Approach was kind enough to give me headings and distance to the airport as I descended. As the distance grew shorter, I never saw the airport until I was looking down the runway lights.

The next day I filled only the wing tank I had run dry the night before. Enroute to the Denton Airport, I timed how long it took for the tank to run dry. It took twenty minutes. I could have made Love Field, but it would have been close. If I had reduced power to economy cruise much earlier, I would have had fuel to spare. Sometimes slow is better.

Greater Southwest Aero Club

Several years after I had been a member of the Hensley Field Aero Club, the club hired a civilian flight instructor to manage the club. Steve, the club’s new manager wanted to update all the club's aircraft to new Skyhawks. I was the rep for Capital Aviation and Cessna at the time. I thought they were crazy for giving up the T-34, but I fixed them up with all new planes at dealer cost.

Steve was a Delta airline copilot expecting to make captain soon. This chance acquaintance of my meeting Steve would begin a relationship that eventually culminated in our starting our own Cessna dealership at Greater Southwest International Airport (GSW), the old Amon Carter Field.

There were a few flight schools in the area that were using the Piper Cherokee, but certainly not in the numbers that were using the Cessna. Pipers were desirable rental aircraft. I had proved that at Mustang Aviation and so I hit on the idea of starting an aero club using Piper Cherokees.

GSW Airport seemed a likely place to start an aero club, so I contacted my ol’ buddy Steve, the Delta pilot, and outlined a plan. Cessna was offering attractive aircraft financing and to compete, Piper also began offering finance and lease plans. Steve co-signed the leases on a new Piper Cherokee 140 and a Cherokee 180. One of the incentives I used to talk Steve into my proposition was that as the chief pilot for the club, he could personally use the club planes anytime he wanted.

There was a very successful VA approved flight school at GSW, Flight Dynamics, Inc. (FDI), which was a Cessna dealer even before I worked for Capital Aviation. FDI did very little airplane rental business. Nevertheless, they were not happy to see an aero club in competition with them on an airport where they had previously enjoyed exclusivity.

The aero club started out as a not-for-profit operation and had been intended only to get a couple of new Cherokees in service. In order to use the ramp for tie-down, you had to be an airport tenant, so I leased the smallest office available in the old airline check-in counter area down the hall from FDI.

The owner of FDI knew me as his old Cessna rep. The airport manager knew me as the new aero club manager. Piper didn’t know Steve and I were silent partners and only Steve knew I was trying to figure out how to start my own FBO. After a couple of years of boring holes in the sky to sell planes on every Podunk airport within 200 miles, I was ready for a new challenge.

The new Southwest Aero Club took off. Pardon the pun. It worked because private pilots enjoyed flying new aircraft at reasonable prices, i.e., retro Mustang Aviation. That was, it worked until the large Piper dealer over at Meacham Field got wind of it and he complained to Aerosmith.

Maurice told me to shut the club down and he would assume the leases on the two planes. It was a matter of pride on my part. I wasn’t willing to do that and Maurice fired me on the spot. Bob Smith, Aerosmith’s founder, told me later he would have overruled Maurice if I had come to him, but I hadn’t.

In addition to his full time job as a Delta Airline pilot, Steve owned a karate school in Irving. Steve wasn’t around much and now, out of a fulltime job, I hung around the airport a lot.

Amon Carter Field

The Amon Carter Terminal building was a very unique structure dating back to the time when architects actually took their time to build a thing of beauty. The main hall of the terminal building was several stories high. Large art deco figurines decorated the walls and the marble floor was inlaid with a giant brass outlined Texas Lone Star. The restaurant in the terminal overlooked a panoramic view of the airport ramp and was now only kept open for the convenience of airport employees and the occasional wandering flight crew or lone pilot.

At the entrance to the long circle drive leading up to the terminal building sat the only remaining B-36. The Convair B-36 had been donated to the city of Fort Worth after the Air Force decommissioned them. The General Dynamics Employees Club had been given the responsibility of keeping the old Bird up, but vandals and souvenir hunters had long since taken its toll on the orphaned ten-engine Peacemaker.

After Amon Carter, Jr., departed for the great newspaper pressroom in the sky, the airport management vacated the facility upstairs that had been Carter’s personal office suite. The office had been a place where Carter would entertain and impress dignitaries and politicians passing through town.

Carter's giant mahogany desk and matching furniture was stacked in the hall and I inquired as to what was going to happen to the stuff. The airport manager, a stereotypical and lifelong bureaucrat, but likable old fellow, indicated it had to be disposed of and would I like to make an offer. “You see,” he explained, “none of us can use the furniture as it belongs to an estate and that would be considered a conflict of interest.”

What the heck, I bid $100 for the lot and my offer was accepted. Now I had two aircraft, a hole in the wall operations office, a bunch of really impressive furniture and no job. There may have been a message in there somewhere, but it escaped me.

Flight Dynamics Incorporated

As it turned out, the owner of Flight Dynamics, Inc., was a flash-in-the-pan, would-be millionaire who had made some good money traveling around the country giving motivational seminars. The name of his original company was Speech Dynamics. He had bought the flight school shortly after the government approved flight training under the new Viet Nam Veteran's Administration Education Act, also known as the second GI Bill.

A flight school had to have been in existence for two years prior to obtaining certification by the VA and the Texas Education Agency (TEA) and so he had bought a struggling FAA approved flight school from some old flight instructor and promoted it into a first class flight training school.

Technically, FDI was still an authorized Cessna dealer, but were really end-users. They bought a half dozen new Cessna 150s and a Skyhawk every year, but never sold anything except their used aircraft when they were ready to buy new ones.

Robert had educated me to the fact that an aircraft can be sold outright or it can be sold one hour at a time, it makes no difference which. He even developed an X-Y graph chart that showed the efficiency of this concept. The graph illustrated how the operator can purchase new aircraft equipment and use the first forty percent of the life of the aircraft nearly for free. We sold a lot of aircraft to flight schools, using this concept. It also probably accounts for why there is still a good supply of older Cessna aircraft on the market today.

Flight Dynamics Corporation

The owner of Flight Dynamics, Inc., had been playing stock options. The stock market was moving steadily downward and many of his margins were being called. Their chief pilot told me that he thought FDI might be picked up for a little of nothing because flight hours had fallen off and several of the new aircraft on the ramp were behind on payments.

Seemed worth a shot, so I put Steve up to approaching the owner with a proposal. The FDI owner didn't know Steve, but Steve was a personable sort a fellow and I felt like he could close the deal. The offer we made was to assume all of the FDI liabilities if the owner would transfer the VA and FAA approved flight school to us. The certifications were the only real asset FDI had. The owner agreed. Overnight we owned a flight school and fourteen aircraft owned us!

The south wing of the Amon Carter Terminal was the old check-in counter and flight departure area in the airline days. Behind these counters were offices, formerly occupied by the various junior airline executives. All along the east wall of these offices were windows that looked out over the airline concourse towards the Dallas skyline.

The largest of these rooms was used as a ground school classroom and another for a pilot’s ready room where an instructor and student could have a cup of coffee and discuss a flight lesson. The plushest of the three offices, the carpeted one, I took for my office and furnished it with my recently acquired prestigious Amon Carter furniture.

We used the old airline passenger counter for checking the school and rental aircraft in and out. The lobby surrounding the counter was never used, so I decorated it with all kinds of Cessna and Piper banners to keep it from looking so barren. I also scrounged up some old couches, easy chairs and a coffee table for the empty lobby. I told the airport manager it was for the use of the general public, but he was well aware that no one wandered down to that area except our customers.

The large concrete aircraft-parking ramp that had been used to accommodate DC-3, DC-6 and Constellation airliners was now filled with Cessna & Piper light airplanes. There were a couple of larger aircraft, a DC-3 and a Convair 240, parked over on the grass. The airport did not allow individual parking, so we fell heir to these aircraft who sublet the space from us. The office across the rear stairwell to the ramp belonged to Web Thomas Aircraft Sales and they parked a few planes on the ramp, but mostly they just brokered planes. Web was a true gentleman.

The trade style FDI and their red logo had wide local public recognition. The problem was the previous owner wanted to keep the old corporation for tax write-off purposes and we had to let him retain the Inc. I kept the name Flight Dynamics as a trade style for certification and advertising and I incorporated under the name Flight Dynamics Corporation (FDC), only a minor nuance from an I to a C, but technically not the same company.

The FDI chief pilot was leaving to fly for a commuter airline and so Steve put his name on the FAA Approved Flight School certification as chief pilot. All the transfers and approvals were accomplished with relative ease. Besides, if you run everyone out of business on minor technicalities, who is going to be left to regulate?

We started flying day and night to produce revenue. Even canvassing students on the phone to get them on the schedule. A new Cessna 150 sold for $4,900 and would bring $3,500 with about 500 hours total time (TT). The trick was to turn the aircraft while they still looked new and had good time before overhaul (TBO) left on the engines. Private owners, unlike flight schools, didn't put a lot of hours on the aircraft.

Slowly, I brought the aircraft payments up to date and began selling off the higher time 150s for about what we owed on them. Cessna Finance Corporation (CFC) offered full floor plan financing, so why not.

Most of the Cessna aircraft were financed with CFC and were all two to three months past due on payments. CFC had not yet wised up to the fact that FDI and FDC were not the same folks. As soon as possible, I started making up some of the back payments on the aircraft. There was no way anyone would have loaned us the money to buy all those airplanes starting out.

During the first few months, any profit we made went into the aircraft. I would tear out a coupon for the furthest behind aircraft payment and mail it off with a check. Sometimes, even a little before I had the money because before the advent of computer banking, I could get 3-4 days float while my out-of-state check cleared our bank. CFC never sent any of them back, so it worked.

The problem was that about eighty percent of our flight time hours were billed to the VA and we were not paid on them for a least a month or so. This left us with very little cash flow and not enough money to pay the instructors, let alone buy gas for the planes. Fortunately, Suzie was full time on staff at the University of Dallas and that was how we were paying the household bills. We made it through the first month on my Enco gas charge card and Steve’s MasterCard.

Drowning In Paperwork

The bookkeeper for Aerosmith, Alma Jean, was a slender blonde, thirtyish and professional in appearance. She was raising three kids, but had always wanted to learn to fly. Maurice had promised her flying lessons when she hired on, but he never followed through on the commitment.

I flew her over to the Piper dealership at Meacham Field once to deliver some aircraft titles and on the return flight she asked about aerobatics. I put the Cherokee 180 into an easy aileron roll, which I might add it does very sloppily. As we rolled out, I looked back over at her with her hands in her lap to hold her skirt down. “Oh,” she said. I stopped at GSW Aero Club to check on things and I showed her around the operation.

I didn’t know Alma Jean very well, but the day I left the Love Field office, I was telling her about the backlog of paperwork awaiting me at FDC. She said, if Steve would give her flying lessons, she’d come over and help out. I told her that Steve sure would and I’d provide a Cessna 150 at no charge.

That Saturday, Steve took her out for her first flying lesson and after lunch she began sorting through the backlog of VA billings forms. Late the following Monday morning she showed up and announced she’d had it with Maurice. She quit that morning and would work for us for whatever we could pay her.

If we could get some of that VA billing money coming in, I told her, maybe we could all get paid. With that, she tore into the stacks of hour meter readings, pending eligibility certificates and billing forms with a vengeance.

Everyone called her AJ because I did. I had made her corporate secretary of record so she could sign forms as an officer of the corporation and told her to sign her name using only her initials and last name.

AJ stayed. I had a head for aviation and she had a head for business. The checkbooks were always in balance, the P&L was up to date and the accounts receivable were collected. I never had to question her work. Over time, I came to think of AJ as more of a partner, than an employee. On slow months, she’d draw half a paycheck just like I did. However, when FDC finally started making a little money, I had the corporation buy both of us company cars and paid her health insurance.

I knew AJ hadn’t gone to college and I asked her one time how she came to understand business and bookkeeping as well as she did. She told me that, at age eighteen, she went to work for an old man in Dallas who owned a bunch of bars. He instructed her to dress up like a lady in high heels and to carry a purse in which she was to bring him the collected bar receipts, as much as $50,000 at a time. He taught her how to check inventory, how to tell when someone was skimming and how to keep books.

Aztec Trainer

We needed a twin-engine aircraft to meet the requirements for multi-engine flight training. The previous owner had a Piper Aztec, which he owned personally and agreed to leave it while he tried to sell the plane. We could lease the plane for $65 per hour dry. That, plus fuel, didn't leave much room for profit, but at least we could continue to offer a multi-engine rating.

Each time an aircraft was checked out, a clipboard containing the last hour meter reading with the keys attached went with it. The meter was read prior to departure and again at the end of each flight. One evening, I routinely locked up the flight school and all of the keys to the aircraft, which was standard procedure. The next morning, the first flight out in the Aztec, indicated that there were three hours of missing time on the hour meter between the time we closed the night before and the first flight of the following day.

The tower closed at 10:00 pm each night, but I questioned the operator anyway. There was no record of the Aztec having flown. Drug runners would steal an aircraft in the middle of the night, make a run to the border sometimes returning the aircraft before it was missed. Other times, leaving the planes parked almost anywhere. However, the missing three hours of flight time did not quite correspond to a Dallas to Mexican border round robin? How the Aztec was unlocked and started could also not be explained unless someone had a duplicate key.

On Cessna aircraft, not sure about Pipers, there were only about twenty different keys. During my tour of duty with Cessna, I accumulated one of each of these keys on a master key ring, which came in handy when we lost the keys to a plane. After questioning everyone remotely involved, I finally concluded the missing time on the Aztec would always remain a mystery.

Twin Comanche

An airline pilot buddy of Steve's had a Piper Twin Comanche that he agreed to lease to us for $35 per hour dry. This was a better deal because we could bill it at the same approved rate as the Aztec. The problem was that this Comanche was plumb squirrelly. Not good for a training aircraft.

For weeks, I had heard stories that at cruise speed the Twin Comanche would suddenly nose over, but I remained skeptical of the reports. There was an air show and fly-in at Weatherford over the weekend and I flew the Twin Comanche over with Suzie and Laura. I recall, the FAA had set up a mobile tower and there was a traffic jam for takeoff that hot dusty afternoon.

Passing over Carswell Air Force Base at cruise speed on our return to GSW, I nosed the Twin Comanche over slightly for an enroute descent. Without any warning, the plane pitched forward as though someone had pushed on the control wheel. I estimated we pulled at least a half a negative-G.

Immediately, I reduced the power and as I did, the forward pressure on the control wheel released. What was discovered later was if the horizontal stabilizer on a Piper Twin Comanche was even a fraction of an inch out of adjustment it would cause this to occur. A service bulletin repair was installed on the Comanche that solved the problem, but the plane had already gained a reputation of being squirrelly.

Complimentary Ground School

My daughter, Laura, was in her early teens and some of the crowd she hung out with were all interested in learning to fly. Laura probably wasn't that interested herself, but she pretended to be in order to get me to sponsor a free ground school for her friends. One of the boys was the Delta chief pilot’s son, so it was also good politics for Steve. A couple of the boys in the class went on to fly for commuter airlines and then on to fly for major carriers after they graduated from college, so I guess it came to some good after all.

The first time I let Laura takeoff a Cessna 150, as she reached takeoff speed, she kept pushing forward on the control wheel thinking that she did not have enough airspeed to lift-off. Guess what, you can fly a Cessna 150 with only the nose wheel on the ground and the main gear up in the air.

After a couple of hours of practice, she got where she could land and takeoff adequately. She should have, she had been flying in the right seat since she was five years old. However, she soon lost interest in pursuing even a student pilot certificate. Been there, done that, I guess. Laura had the potential to be a good pilot and was already an excellent navigator, but the desire wasn't there.

Aero Shell

We were now operating six Cessna 150s, two Cessna Skyhawks as instrument trainers and a newly acquired Cessna 310K for twin-engine training. Flight time on the Cessna 150s was so heavy that we were performing hundred hour inspections on the aircraft on the average of every three weeks.

Parts were always a problem and at least one aircraft was down all the time. We would cannibalize the downed aircraft for parts to fix the others and keep them flying. The standing joke was that the little trainers were a pack of wolves, if one fell to its knees, the others would eat it alive.

A mechanic by the name of Howard offered to maintain our planes on a contract basis, but our business soon became so demanding that he ended up working full time on our birds. The previous owners had been using the Humble or Enco, which later became Exxon, engine oil in the 150s and were having to do top overhauls on the engines as early as 600 hours on some of them.

Howard insisted we change to Aero Shell engine oil. So we stopped letting the airport’s Enco dealer, Butler Aviation, check and add the oil in our aircraft. Sure enough, after switching oils, we found we could get 1100 to 1200 hours out of the older used Cessna 150 engine before overhaul.

Rule 23

We had no hanger facility, but the old south passenger wing of the terminal building extended out onto our ramp. Howard used an old baggage handling office to store parts and supplies. In the heat of the afternoon, he would pull the aircraft up into the shade of the passenger wing in order to work on them.

The only thing preventing an aircraft from going full-up under one of the old luggage bay sections was a four-inch steel post centered on an overhead steel and concrete beam. I looked it over and decided the post was not structural and we could use the bay as a maintenance hanger if the post was removed.

Knowing that I would have to deal with bureaucrats in order to obtain permission, I applied Rule 23 to the problem. Rule 23 states, “It is easier to obtain forgiveness than to obtain permission.” Taking a cutting torch to the steel support, I cut a half-inch gap out of the support post and waited for several days to see if the structure settled onto the gap.

If the gap had closed, I would have welded it back together and forgotten about it. The structure would likely be torn down in the not too distant future anyway, so what was the harm. The gap didn’t close indicating that the structure hadn’t budged. I went to the airport manager and asked to rent the space under the passenger wing. After obtaining the lease, Howard removed the center post completely with a cutting torch.

Bureaucrats

Government bureaucrats are not one of my favorite things, but of course one could not even slightly detect that by what I have written so far. At one point, it seemed to me that the government would have been better off to just install a desk and telephone with one bureaucrat at our facility and thus save lots of money over the numerous briefcase carrying flunkies who constantly intruded on our daily routine.

A young gentleman showed up in my office. His gray business suit was wrinkled from one too many nights of staying in cheap motels. He asked to see the manager. As a general rule, a guest without a briefcase with a tie and a bulge in his jacket was FBI, without the tie probably DEA. With a briefcase and in a three-piece suit, probably a T-Man or IRS. Who was this guy?

He informed me that he was with OCEA. I wondered what the heck that was. Seemed as how the small prefab building we owned had a restroom and he advised me that upon inspecting our restroom facilities, he was going to have to write a violation report because the dimensions on the restroom pots were not to specifications. What to do? I didn't know whether to laugh or cuss. I just asked the gentleman to write up whatever he felt like he needed to and please leave.

The TEA Nazis

The Texas Education Agency required each VA approved flight school to send in a schedule of their ground school and curriculum. The curriculum was no problem because we simply used the standard FAA ground school curricula enhanced considerably by our own training aids. Plus, most of our flight instructors and myself held FAA Ground Instructor ratings.

We had so many students working odd hours that it necessitated our holding ground school any time they might show up. Often the same instructor who gave the student personalized ground training also flew with him, so we just scheduled ground school from 7:00am until 10:00pm everyday.

The TEA examiner couldn't handle that concept and the day that he and his assistant arrived to examine the school, he indicated that he was going to make us publish regular scheduled hours for our classes.

After the discussion became somewhat heated, due to our not being able to convince them that the students actually received more personalized training the way we did it, the examiner asked everyone except myself to leave the room. He then proceeded to explain to me that unless we changed our catalogue to his satisfaction, he would close down the flight school.

Rising to my feet, I walked over and got in the examiner’s face and stared him right in the eye. After a long pause, I said, "Look, you Nazi SOB," which was followed by another period of silence as we stared at each other. It was questionable at that point as to whether we were going to start swinging or laugh. Then I said, "You know what I'm going to do?”

“No what?” he replied.

“I'm going to change that damn catalogue exactly the way you want it."

My instructors kept giving their students ground school at the student’s convenience, except I had them write out two counter receipts instead of one. I ran into the examiner a few times after that and he’d start laughing when he saw me coming.

The Karate Kid

Steve was still a copilot for Delta and there were no openings for captain at the Dallas hub. Steve, however, found out that there were openings for captains out of the New Orleans hub, so in order to get promoted to captain, he started deadheading his flights out of Dallas into New Orleans.

Steve’s karate school was also taking a lot of his time. The group out of California that had franchised his karate school was affiliated with Elvis and Priscilla Presley. This was how Steve had originally met Elvis and he would fly to various karate meets in order to hang out with the Presley crowd.

The following spring, I asked Steve to lunch and told him that I needed to talk to him about something. The week before, Steve had presented Elvis with a matched set of engraved karate swords on stage at the Las Vegas Hilton. Between his duties with Delta Airline and managing his karate school, Steve had become less and less involved at Flight Dynamics.

At lunch, I explained to Steve that Flight Dynamics had become my main focus. Where as with him, it was just a passing fancy. I would like to buy him out if he was agreeable.

Steve asked, “Why do you need to buy me out? You run the place like you want anyway. I’m not involved all that much.”

“When we started,” I explained, “this was just a passing interest for me like it is with you now, but without intending for it to become so, it looks like FDC is going to be my primary livelihood for the next few years.”

Steve was a Mormon and an elder in his church and he had always been more than fair with me in all our dealings. In fact, he jokingly called me a Jack Mormon to which there was some underlying meaning that I never really quite understood. I’m not sure, but I think it was a compliment.

"Well, how does $5,000 sound to you?" Steve asked.

Actually, it was less than I had expected. "Sounds great to me and you can come and use an airplane anytime you want," I replied and we shook hands on the deal.

New Chief Instructor Pilot

Normally I kept six or seven full-time flight instructors on staff and paid them on commission so the more they flew, the more they made.

A lot of veteran pilots were now cycling back from tours of duty in Viet Nam as the war ended. Most were looking for ways to build their civilian flight time enroute to a better paying airline or company pilot job. Many were excellent pilots, but it lead to a lot of turnover in instructors.

Needing to take Steve's name off of our FAA Flight School certification as chief pilot, I hired a young pilot by the name of Ted. He had been flying a plane for a construction company and was not ex-military.

Ted met the requirements for chief pilot and although several of the other pilots had more experience than Ted, I needed someone dependable who would stay with me and not move on at the first opportunity. As it turned out, Ted and AJ both stayed with me until we closed down the operation years later.

Next Airplane Up

Whenever we’d put a new aircraft on the line with older aircraft, everybody wanted to fly the newest ones. The new airplanes ran up an excessive amount of hours and the older ones wouldn’t get flown. This forced me to implement a policy of strict rotation on the aircraft.

In other words, each outgoing pilot worked their way down the row of clipboards, known as first-in, last-out (FILO). The luck of the draw allowed everyone to get to fly a brand new aircraft once in a while.

Because I would hear every reason in the world why a certain aircraft wasn't being flown, I implemented my own personal policy of pick-it and fly-it. In the evening when I was sick of complaints, bankers and paperwork, when the air was still and pleasant to fly without the afternoon thermals, I would pick an airplane at random and go flying. I’d write up a squawk on any and every possible defect to be worked off on the next 100-hour inspection. This resulted in all of the aircraft being maintained in top condition. Additionally, I had the planes washed often and kept clean.

After an instructor with a student had dinged a prop and another had busted a wheel fairing, I called all the instructors together and questioned them in detail as to the circumstances behind the periodic minor damage. There were various excuses, but they all centered on the fact that the airplanes were damaged trying to prevent a more serious accident.

Look, I explained, “I have never heard of anyone being injured or killed in an aircraft that was not damaged. Take care of the aircraft first and it will take care of you.”

After each screw-up, a hot check, unfilled-out-paperwork or whatever, I would write up the do’s and don’ts of the incident and place it in a notebook on the counter.

When you operate 24-7, not everyone gets the word. So the instructors were required to check the notebook for new entries. Ted nicknamed the book The Marvin Says Book, and everyone picked up on the term. The many entries were eventually typed up and in its completed form it became our operations manual.

PART IV. Commercial Aviation

 

Chapter Seventeen

AIRCRAFT DEALERSHIP

 

From time to time, I would stand at the window of my office looking out over the ramp full of aircraft and think back to when I would have enjoyed owning any one of those airplanes to fly. Now I was so busy running this place that I didn’t have time to go fly for fun anymore.

Like the airline captain who owned a Pitts Special biplane. He departed in a Boeing 747 flight and after reaching cruising altitude of 33,000 he slid his seat back and looked out the cockpit window at the beautiful sunshiny day below. "You know,” he remarked to his copilot, “If a guy didn't have to work for a living, this would be a great day to go flying."

Just Sign Your Name

What I remember most about the Cessna delivery center at Wichita was a large map on the wall in the back office with three concentric circles drawn around the delivery center airport. On each of the circles was a series of stickpins.

When someone would ask what the pins represented, the man at the delivery center would explain that the first circle was the range of a Cessna 150, the second circle was the range of a 172 Skyhawk and the third circle was the range of a 182 Skylane. Each of the stickpins represented an aircraft that had crashed where some delivery pilot had run out of gas.

The first time I sent my new chief pilot Ted up to the Cessna factory at Wichita for a last minute pick up on a new Cessna, I told him to just sign my name to the delivery receipt and leave with the aircraft.

Apparently, the clerk at the desk had a suspicion that Ted was not who he said he was. We were supposed to telex any pilot name change to the center ahead of time, but as I recall there was some problem about it being over the weekend.

Ted continued trying to convince the man he was Marvin Arnold and had forgotten his wallet with his ID. The delivery center clerk went into the backroom and unbeknownst to Ted, called me on the phone for verification.

"Oh yeah." I said, "That's my chief pilot. It's okay to release the plane to him.

The clerk returned to the counter pretending he was convinced Ted was who he claimed to be and pushed the clipboard in front of Ted for him to sign for the aircraft. Without thinking Ted signed his own name. He looked up with a funny grin on his face, scribbled out his name and signed mine. After Ted departed, the clerk was still laughing when he called me back to tell me what had happened.

GSW Flight Operations

By the end of the second year in business, I had managed to upgrade most of the fleet to new aircraft. Additionally, we added a Grumman American two-seater and a four-seater to our fleet of Cessna aircraft. Because we had the newest planes and ran the school professionally, we became the number one flight school in the DFW Metroplex, flying more hours than our next two competitors combined.

Jim Hardy, an airline captain and personal friend, offered to buy white American Airline uniform shirts with captain epaulettes for our flight instructors at his cost. All the instructors were in favor and before long everyone got into the swing and wore dark slacks with their shirts. I ran a tight operation and was even told once that all I needed to complete my uniform was a swagger stick.

The main runway at GSW was over a mile long and students complained about their instructors making them taxi to the end of the runway for takeoff. It was probably a justifiable complaint, but as I explained more than once, “There would be no way I could explain to the FAA why a student had an engine failure with a mile of runway behind them.”

One thing we had to be extremely cautious about, especially with students, was to be careful of the heavy aircraft shooting practice approaches to GSW. During the entire time we operated the flight school, we never had a fatality or serious injury. We did experience two crashes, but both times the pilots walked away. Luck maybe, but I prefer to think it was good training.

Cessna 150 Crash

A private pilot, building his time for a commercial ticket, checked out a Cessna 150 and flew out to the designated practice area north of Grapevine Lake. Late that afternoon, the telephone rang and it was the student calling from a small country grocery store. He explained that he had crashed the Cessna 150 in an open field and except for a minor cut on his forehead he was not injured, but the plane was seriously damaged.

Howard and I jumped into a Skyhawk and headed north to try and spot the plane. Sure enough, in an open field sat the Cessna 150 on its back. After making a low pass over the pasture to check out the terrain, I circled and landed my Skyhawk beside the upside-down Cessna 150.

Howard's mechanic helper had left in his truck to pick up the pilot at the grocery store and they arrived shortly after we landed. The student pilot explained that the cut on his forehead happened when he released his seat belt and fell head first onto the overhead map light. While practicing pylon turns, the engine started to overheat and then quit. He tried several times to crank it with the starter to no avail and leveled out to land in the open grass area straight ahead. The wind was calm at the time and it was a good choice of fields.

Unfortunately, the student stalled the aircraft prior to touchdown 10-15 feet in the air. The plane slammed down hard on the main gear and the nose wheel busted off of the strut. A short distance later, the nose strut dug a furrow into the dirt for not more than fifty feet. All of this was obvious by looking at the marks in the soft dirt. The final act of the crippled bird was to slowly turn over, landing gently on its back. The prop was not bent because it wasn't turning.

When I opened the engine cowl door, the oil spout filler cap/dipstick fell out onto the ground. The inside of the engine compartment was covered with oil. The answer to the engine failure was immediately obvious. When the pilot had checked the oil during preflight, he had not tightened the filler cap. All during his flight, the engine had been blowing oil out the filler spout until the engine overheated and seized.

The young pilot came in to my office the following day and said he wanted to quit flying after his experience the day before. After thinking for a few minutes, I explained to the young man he was liable for the $1,000 deductible on the aircraft because it was clearly his fault. However, if he could overcome his fear and finish his commercial license flight training, the company would absorb the loss. Otherwise, we expected him to pay the deductible. The decision was up to him.

The young man finished the course and obtained his commercial pilot's license. Thus, proving an old adage, “If you get thrown from a horse, get right back up on it and ride or you’ll be scared to ride for the rest of your life.”

Piper Arrow Auto Gear

We purchased an almost new Piper Arrow, the retractable gear version of the popular Cherokee. The Arrow had an automatic landing gear extension sensor that dropped the gear at low airspeeds and retarded power settings. The override lever had to be held in the up position when practicing stalls.

I took the Arrow on a short trip. Returning to GSW, I hadn’t played off my altitude to enter the traffic pattern. I did a power-on wingover in order to make a rapid descent, the kind they always show in the movies where the WW II fighters peel off.

It may have been the G-force that caused the gear to start down, but not a good thing to have happen at high speed. I reached between the seat with my right hand to hold the gear override lever up and stop the gear from extending. Letting go of the control yoke, I retarded the throttle with my left. The plane did kind of a squirrelly recovery coming out of the dive and my passenger exclaimed, “I thought we were going to die!”

“Not really,” I replied with a smile, “I’ve been a whole lot closer to dying than that. Several times before!”

Piper Arrow Out Of Gas

A construction equipment salesman and his friend rented the Piper Arrow to fly to Atlanta. I was informed that the pilot had landed the aircraft, out of gas, in a Georgia hay field. The landing gear was extended and it might have been a successful forced landing, except they ran into one of the bales of hay that were scattered about the farmer's field.

The damage to the aircraft was not extensive, so I had an aircraft maintenance facility in Atlanta pick up the Arrow and repair it. The pilot had over two hundred hours of flight time. When he came to my office to explain how the accident had occurred, I told him, “I’m glad both of you were uninjured. However, it was not an accident! It was a crash caused by your failure to calculate your required fuel properly,” and then I asked, "How high were you when you ran out of gas?"

The pilot said, "About 8,000 feet AGL."

Then I asked, "What is the glide ratio of a Piper Arrow with the wheels retracted?"

Of course, he didn't know. So I explained, “The glide ratio on that plane is about 18 to 1. Better than some gliders. This means that for every one foot the aircraft descends, the aircraft moves forward 18 feet.”

“Okay?” the pilot replied. He didn’t understand.

So I took out a WAC chart of the area and asked him to point out exactly where he ran out of gas, which he did. Taking a pencil, I multiplied 8,000 times 18 and arrived at a figure, which I then divided by 6,000 to equal nautical miles.

"What this means is," I continued, "you could have glided 24 miles in any direction and landed at an airport." With a protractor, I drew a 48-mile circle around the point he had run out of gas. Within that circle were three major airports, six uncontrolled paved runways and a half dozen grass airfields.

"Why did you land in a hay field?" I asked and added, "You are going to be expected to pay the deductible on the insurance and I strongly suggest you get some additional dual instruction on flight planning and forced landings."

Aerobatic Training

The first year Cessna introduced the Cessna 150 Aerobat, we purchased one. The plane was a standard Cessna 150 with some doublers in the vertical stabilizer and beefed-up wing strut attachments. We were one of the first flight school or rental clubs to offer aerobatic training in the new Cessna Aerobat.

Parachutes were mandatory during aerobatic training. Several of my instructors were Viet Nam vets and proficient in aerobatic maneuvers. The standard school rule, however, was no aerobatics below 6,000 feet AGL.

Late one afternoon, this tall lanky instructor pilot and his student came in carrying their parachute backpacks. Both looked a little green around the gills, so immediately I inquired about their flight and if there was a problem. The instructor explained that they had been at the required altitude in the south practice area over by Grand Prairie when they got the Aerobat into a flat spin and couldn’t get the nose down.

The instructor explained that after losing about 3,000 feet, he was strongly considering pulling the door release and bailing out, but he could hear my voice in the back of his head saying, “If you take care of the airplane, it will take care of you.” With one last effort he added full power and full opposite controls and the little Aerobat pulled out of the flat spin.

Aviation & The Press

A local television newscaster showed up at the airport one day looking for a human-interest story on the safety of light airplane flying. A few days before, an airliner had collided with a single-engine Cessna just north of Fort Worth. The airliner cut the Cessna in half, but the airliner was able to return to Love Field for a safe landing.

This topic was and continues to be difficult to explain to the non-flying general public. The headlines usually read, "Light aircraft collides with airliner." The fact is that the larger, faster aircraft overtakes and collides with the smaller and slower aircraft.

So I attempted to educate the reporter. “Simple physics dictates that the slower object cannot overtake the faster object. The slower object can be in the path of the faster object and be overrun, but it cannot do the over running. The fastest combat fighter generally has the advantage as it can overtake and shoot down the slower fighter.”

Most of my dissertation had gone completely over the newscaster's head so I explained further, “A light aircraft is more maneuverable than a large aircraft and if it had collided with the larger aircraft, it was because the pilot of the smaller aircraft did not see the large airliner coming at him like a freight train and failed to get out of its way.”

I asked the newscaster, "Did you know that I can land a small Cessna in less space than it takes to stop a car going 60 mph?” This the reporter didn’t believe, so I invited him to come and go flying with me. He was looking for a story anyway, so he agreed and his video cameraman sat in the back seat and shot between our shoulders as I turned final for runway one-seven. There was about a 20 mile an hour wind blowing straight down the runway. Slowly, I increased the angle of attack and lowered the Cessna Paralift flaps to their fully extended position.

Keeping just enough power on to hold the stall warning horn on without stalling, I sat the Skyhawk down on the runway overrun. The video cameraman was able to record the top edge of the number seven out his side window as we came to a stop and swung the nose around. The story may never have aired on TV, but the newscaster and his cameraman left with a whole different opinion of light aircraft and their capabilities.

Skylane Glide To Landing

A middle-aged doctor, a private pilot, had been looking at a Cessna 182 Skylane we had for sale. One of our instructors had already given him a demo ride, but the doctor continued to be undecided about the purchase. I inquired as to what were his apprehensions. He explained that he just wasn't certain if single-engine aircraft flying was safe.

"Come on, let's go flying in the Skylane,” I said, “You sit there and watch and I’ll show you how safe they are, instead of us talking about it.”

After takeoff, I climbed to about 4,000 feet and pointed the Skylane southwest towards the Arlington Municipal Airport, which was about ten miles away from us by that time. First I explained to my passenger, “Don’t be alarmed at what I am about to show you.” I reached down, pulled the throttle back slowly, increased the prop pitch and turned off the mag switch. Of course, the prop stopped turning and I established a normal glide. It seemed to take a long time before we descended to approach pattern altitude at Arlington Airport.

Entering the base leg for the south runway, I explained to my passenger. “Okay, we lost our engine some miles back and now we were going to make a normal landing at a local airport.” For safety, I restarted the engine and left it at idle with the carburetor heat on as we glided to a final approach for landing. Actually, I was a little high and had to add flaps to lose some altitude before touchdown. I let the doctor fly the Skylane back to GSW and he bought the plane.

Missing Airplanes

Addison Airport north of Dallas was notorious for pilots running drugs in rented and borrowed aircraft. So much so, that the DEA had a full-time unit assigned there to plant hidden transponders on suspected drug running aircraft. This enabled the plane to be tracked by radar into and out of Mexico. We never had much trouble with that sort of thing at GSW as we took a lot of care to know the people who we rented to and our GI Bill students weren’t that type of clientele.

Arriving for work one morning, I was greeted by one of our instructors asking where was our new Cessna 210. Looking out the window, I explained I had no idea unless someone had it checked out. “By the way, whose white Cessna 402 is that parked on our ramp?” I inquired. No one knew. An hour or so later, an FBO from Lake Whitney called to tell us that our Cessna 210 was on his ramp. The passenger seats had been removed and there appeared to be traces of marijuana grass all over the carpet.

Mystery solved. I then proceeded to check out the registration in the Cessna 402 and found out that it belonged over at Redbird Airport. The Cessna 402 was in the same condition as our 210 and both aircraft had the right amount of flight time on them for a round trip across the border.

Reconstructing the events of the night before, it appeared that the Cessna 402 was stolen at Redbird in the early evening and probably dropped its load somewhere south of Dallas before landing at GSW. Remember, the tower shut down at 10 pm. The brigands then stole our Cessna 210 making one more run in the wee hours of the morning and abandoned the plane at the small Lake Whitney airport.

After the DEA completed their investigation, we traded aircraft. The missing seats were probably laying somewhere in an empty field in the state of Coahuila De Mexico. Our insurance paid for replacement seats and we used our Cessna dealer parts discount to offset the deductible.

Aircraft Parking Lot

Butler Aviation, at the north end of the airport, serviced the transit aircraft. They had a large hangar, but had only limited ramp parking. One aircraft that was parked at Butler for a while was a Douglas Dragon. A one-of-a-kind custom modified plane rumored to belong or have belonged to Howard Hughes. I seemed to always miss whoever was flying it. If Hughes was, I never saw him. The plane was painted dark blue with a gold and red Chinese dragon painted on the rear empennage and up the vertical stabilizer. The wing design, nacelles and landing gear were vintage DC-3. Douglas built the Dragons in limited quantity called the B-27 and a C-67 model without the bomb bay.

On the other hand, the ramp space down at our end of the field around the old terminal had acres of empty concrete and attracted a unique collection of large vintage aircraft.

An old Douglas DC-6 airliner with the name Jefferson Airplane painted on the side was parked in our back door, but was soon replaced by a Lockheed Constellation. Except for the two planes’ arrival and final departure, neither plane ever flew. They belonged to a rock group that I believe may have started in Fort Worth. The guys in the rock band would come out occasionally and play in the old airliners like a bunch of kids. Later, the group changed its name to Jefferson Starship and bought a private jet from Web Thomas and hired a charter pilot.

A fellow by the name of Covol owned a B-25 that never flew either. Covol and I had worked together as contract engineers. Whenever I saw him, I always inquired what name he was using before I greeted him as he often used different names on resumes he sent out to match a specific contract job’s requirements.

Covol had this fantasy of building a casino on the coast of Honduras with its own private landing strip. When he retired, he planned to fly the gambling clientele to his casino in the B-25, which he was converting to passenger use. On any nice weekend, he would be out there in the shade of the old terminal building with B-25 parts scattered all over the ramp.

We gave Confederate Air Force planes like the B-24 Diamond Lil’ free parking when they came through transit. And then there was the preacher’s sky blue Convair 240.

Flying Fortress

Piccadilly Lil' was one of the B-17 Flying Fortress used in the movie War Lovers, starring Steve McQueen. In route home from the filming, the B-17 blew an engine and asked permission to park it on our ramp. The Delta Airline captain ferrying the B-17 and a mechanic worked on the plane off and on for a couple of months borrowing our shop tools. I jokingly said to the ferry pilot, “When you get her flying you owe me a flight.

The afternoon they finished, the Captain came up to my office and asked, “You ready to go fly the B-17?” I climbed aboard and the Captain pointed for me to get in the left seat. I paused. “Fly her just like a DC-3,” he said.

During engine crank and run-up you could feel the awesome power of those four large engines. In order to see over the nose, I had to literally stand on the rudder pedals and lean against the back of the seat. In position for takeoff, the Captain told me to give her full throttle for takeoff and that he would hold his hand below the throttles at the pull back point for climb out. With not very much of a load on the B-17, she lifted off effortlessly with a relatively short ground run.

At about 1,000 AGL, we passed over the North Lake Power Plant and I remember thinking, “Bombs away!” I wondered around north of Dallas at about 2,000 feet as the mech checked out some things and then we headed for Addison Airport where a local TV station was to do a story on Piccadilly Lil's return home.

The old Addison airstrip looked like a postage stamp for this aircraft. I looked at the Captain to make sure he wanted me to make the landing and he nodded for me to go ahead.

Using my standard DC-3 approach technique, I made a perfect, almost three-point, landing on my first try. When I pulled the power back, the old B-17 became a pussycat and I didn't even use half of the runway. An amazing old bird!

During the TV interview, I remember the Captain saying, “We just stopped by to fill up with oil and check the gas.”

I kept a large framed photo of the B-17 on my office wall. After the umpteenth person asked if I had flown B-17s in WW II, and I replied I wasn’t that old, I took the darn picture down.

Divert to GSW

Dallas Love Field very rarely had ground fog, but on a chilly fall morning, the entire Dallas and Fort Worth area was experiencing drizzling rain and spotted ground fog. I knew there wasn't going to be any civil aviation flying that morning, but I thought I’d go to the office and catch up on some paperwork.

I unlocked the door to my office, turned on the overhead fluorescent lights and didn’t bother to open the drapes due to the fog and the early morning darkness. Sitting at my desk, I was trying to figure out where to start when I kept hearing this high-pitched humming noise.

What was that noise anyway? Sounded like a bunch of sick trolls all trying to sing in harmony. I opened the drapes and couldn’t see anything so turned out the overhead lights and pressed my nose against the windowpane. There were a dozen or so airliners full of passengers parked all over the terminal ramp with their auxiliary engines running.

Dallas Love Field, as it turned out, was zero-zero and GSW was barely at minimums so all that morning, ATC had been diverting the Love Field airline traffic over to our facility instead of putting them in a holding pattern.

The fog soon lifted and like a herd of turtles all the airlines departed. Once again, quiet returned to our big little airport. GSW had not seen that many airliners since the heyday of the piston engine passenger planes.

PART IV. Commercial Aviation

 

Chapter Eighteen

GREATER SOUTHWEST AIRPORT

 

Trying to run a flight school, air taxi service and be a landlord kept me hopping. “I didn't have time to sell a $100,000 airplane because I’m too busy filling the Coke machine,” was becoming my motto. When you’re the one who runs the place, you end up doing everything that nobody else will do.

Nevada Aircraft Auction

This was the era of high volume General Aviation aircraft sales. A group of promoters in Las Vegas started a monthly airplane auction. At first, they tried to attract the high rollers by throwing cocktail parties the night before, but it soon evolved into a dealer's aircraft auction. Our used aircraft sales were going good at GSW, so I attended several of the Las Vegas aircraft auctions, but the promoters finally closed it down a year or so later as interest fell off.

On one such trip, I departed in the company Cessna 310 with Ted, my chief pilot, and a prospective aircraft buyer. We got a late start that evening and by nightfall, we were headed into a snowstorm approaching Flagstaff, Arizona. The night was pitch black and we were cruising at about 12,000 feet. Ted wanted to fly through the snowstorm, but I said no way, there are big rocks in the clouds out in this territory. At Flagstaff, the airport was still VFR and I insisted that we circle and land.

The courtesy car carried us to the Holiday Inn, which was having its weekly buffet dinner, which included a bottomless wine carafe. Our passenger soon gave up and went to bed, but Ted and I continued to try to reach the bottom of the remaining wine carafes until late that evening.

The last thing I remember that night was my head hitting the pillow after I managed to get to my room. Long after sunup the following morning, the bright sunlight glaring through a crack in the drape finally woke me.

It was then that I heard a loud Texan voice on the balcony exclaim, "Oh, she-it."

Stumbling out onto the motel balcony, I found Ted standing there in his pajamas looking straight up at the 14,000-foot snow-capped mountain to the north of our motel.

Laughingly I said, "See, I told you there were rocks in those clouds last night."

We purchased several planes at the Las Vegas Air Auctions. One, a brown and tan Cessna 310 F-model, I resold for a profit before we got out of town and Ted flew the other one back.

Air Taxi Certification

Greater Southwest Airport, the old Amon Carter Field, was located north of Six Flags Over Texas and in the center of a growing industrial park district in the Mid-Cities area of the DFW Metroplex. Commercial business was booming.

I formed Greater Southwest Aviation, Inc. (GSA), as a holding company for FDC and some other aviation assets. FDC was getting more and more requests for air taxi service, so it was time to get a couple of my instructors and myself certified under Federal Air Regulation Part 145.

When I took my air taxi check ride in our Cessna 310 with the FAA examiner, he asked me to climb to 6,000 feet AGL in the practice area. Then he said, "You have a fire in your right engine burning out of control, what are you going to do?"

Well, I really wasn't expecting that to be a question on the test. I thought the test would be on my flying skills like single engine-out procedures, things of that sort. Reasoning that if I really did have an engine on fire, I'd want to get the bird on the ground as quickly as possible, so I chopped the power, slowed the aircraft down, dropped the flaps and as soon as my airspeed slowed, lowered the gear.

We were coming out of the sky at about 2,500 feet a minute, which meant I was going to be on the ground in less than three minutes and I set up an approach to a large open cow pasture. The FAA examiner advised me to resume normal flight and return to Meacham Field. He certified me as an air taxi pilot, so I guess I had made the right decision.

Nearer My God To Thee

Airborne in a thunderstorm with objects floating around in the cockpit, good Christian or not, most pilots find themselves doing some serious praying. The saying goes “There are no atheists in a foxhole,” and I can assure you there are very few atheists in an aircraft cockpit in a thunderstorm. When people ask me if I am religious, my standard answer is, "When you’re a pilot, you’re a little closer to God in more ways than one."

From time to time, we received calls to transport bodies and I never liked this type of flight. A few years back, I had gone with another pilot down to San Angelo to transport a stretcher patient with a serious head injury back to Dallas. Just after takeoff, the patient died. The wife and daughter were onboard and it was a really bad experience. I much preferred live healthy passengers after that on my air taxi runs.

One afternoon, we got a call to go pick up a body from out of town. Being the only pilot available, I scheduled a Cherokee Six we leased to make the charter run. As the afternoon wore on, a storm began rolling in with thunder and lightning crackling all around. Jerry, a Continental pilot I used for FAR Part 91 flights in the DC-3 and Convair 240, was hanging around. Jerry was what I call a people person, about as sanguine as you can get. He also loved flying and didn’t care what in.

The weather got worse as the afternoon wore on and I told Jerry I was going to cancel the flight that night. He said, “I’ll take the flight for you. I’ve carried a lot of those folks and I have never had a complaint out of one of them yet.”

For what it’s worth, when filing a flight plan, you do not report the body. If the pilot has no other passengers, the correct report is, "One soul on board."

Vice Presidential Candidate

The Convair 240 that parked at our ramp was owned by an evangelical church group. We inherited the Convair and Jerry with the purchase of Flight Dynamics. The church group contended they should get free parking, but did agree to lease us the aircraft from time to time, so I went along with the deal.

Jerry was type certified in the Convair, but the copilot only had to have a commercial and first or second class flight physical. Ted, one of the other instructors or myself would fly copilot with Jerry as needed.

Flying over to Addison Airport to pick up some passengers in the Convair, Jerry let me make the approch and landing. When I slowed the Convair on approch, the plane showed no indication of stalling, but set up an excessive sink rate in level flight. The controls had a stall-warning shaker that shook the yoke prior to a stall because of this characteristic.

Clark, the operator at Mangrum Field was type certified in the DC-3. He got a charter request from Sergeant Shriver, who was running for vice president of the United States at the time. We made a deal through Clark to provide two aircraft for Shriver to tour around North Texas and Southern Oklahoma.

Jerry and Ted flew the Convair 240 carrying Shriver and his entourage. Clark and myself, followed in the DC-3 with a rag-tag assortment of press people. It was a scene right out of the Bill Murray movie Where the Buffalo Roam.

Turned out to be a good thing Jerry was flying the Convair due to some of the short fields we went in like Childress. The DC-3 was okay, but tight for the Convair. We hopped around a half dozen small airports. Shriver would go into town, meet the locals, eat some bar-b-que and stump for a while. We’d wait at a local café and then back to the planes and off again.

The last stop on the tour was Altus Air Force Base where we waited in the pilot’s ready room. An Air Force Captain came in and asked who was going to pay the landing fees for those two large aircraft sitting on his ramp. All three pilots looked straight at me and I quickly suggested that the Captain should see Shriver's press secretary.

What was going through all our minds was that this Air Force Captain was about to ask us for several hundred dollars in landing fees based on the weight of the two aircraft.

Jerry asked, “About how much will the landing fee be?” The rest of us hadn’t even thought to ask.

The Air Force Captain was starting to get a little ticked-off at the runaround and replied tartly, "Twelve dollars!"

"Oh," replied Jerry, "Let me get this."

"No, let me get it," said Clark and all of us fumbled for our wallets, laughing.

After the tour was finished, we returned the group to Dallas Love Field where their large charter jet was waiting.

Preacher Man’s Convair

The church group who owned the Convair 240 didn't feel like they were getting enough revenue from our occasional charter usage. They advised Jerry they were going to lease the aircraft full time to a guitar player named Buckwheat, which they did. The aircraft was taken down to the old Central Airlines hangar at the far south end of the field, which was now a paint shop. Both sides of the tail were custom painted with a large guitar and the giant letters "Buckwheat."

Ol’ Buckwheat and his music group used the plane a couple of times and never paid anything on the lease. The church ended up with the aircraft back and had to pay to have the tail painted over. In the meantime, FDC started billing them $75 a month for ramp parking.

The small Saginaw Airport north of Fort Worth Meacham Field was rumored to occasionally been used for unloading bales of marijuana. The church group who owned the Convair leased the plane to some soldier-of-fortune pilot known to operate out of Saginaw and the plane ended up parked at Saginaw.

Jerry got a call asking him to go over to Saginaw and get the Convair. I flew him over in one of our planes. Jerry looked the airfield and the situation over. A large plane can be landed on a short airstrip that it often cannot be taken off from.

Jerry told the pilot who had landed the plane and who wanted it taken back to GSW that he would charge him $200 for flying it out, but first they would have to put a 55 gallon barrel in the far aft luggage compartment and fill it with water. Jerry knew his aircraft and knew doing this would bring the empty airliner back into CG. The pilot refused to comply with Jerry’s request, so we left. Someone eventually returned the Convair to GSW because it showed back up on our ramp.

Two weeks later, the pilot who had used the Convair was found in the burned out wreckage of a Lodestar full of marijuana that crashed during an engine failure takeoff on a road in northern Mexico. After those two fiascos, the Convair 240 remained on our ramp and their parking fees were paid on time.

My Favorite Airplane

Warner-Lambert, an aircraft modification center based in St. Louis, custom modified a few lower-time ex-airline DC-3s with executive interiors. Many of the main line DC-3s exceeded the 60,000 hours TT for which the FAA required a main spar teardown and inspection. This was a very expensive repair and made the newer, lower-time Goony Birds much more desirable.

A Douglas DC-3 at Love Field, N37F, belonged to the vice president of Braniff Airline. The aircraft had the wildest interior with zebra skin seats, burnt orange carpeting and club seating with a mahogany inlaid map of the world card table. The DC-3 seated about eighteen passengers in living room comfort.

The Braniff VP had taken one of the lowest time airliners, about 25,000 hours TT, when Braniff stopped using them and had it modified at Warner-Lambert with the custom executive interior. Word on the street was that the DC-3 was not for sale, but if it did fly, it was not very often.

I contacted Web Thomas and asked him to see if the plane could be purchased and if so for how much. Web’s wife had been a Braniff stewardess and later an executive secretary at the Braniff corporate offices. If anyone had an in, Web did. Web said the VP wouldn’t sell the plane. I said ask him anyway. He did and the VP told Web to sell it to me for $25,000. He had gotten used to flying in jets and wasn’t using the DC-3 anymore. Web couldn’t believe the deal was made. “Simple,” I told Web, “Three Seven Fox was meant to be my plane.”

We operated the DC-3 under FAR Part 94. Very few DC-3s were ever operated under FAR Part 145 air taxi. The FAA, however, would have preferred that all aircraft over 12,500 pounds be operated under FAR Part 121 because this gave them more control.

The loophole was that the aircraft could not be leased with the flight crew. In other words, the user had to lease the aircraft and hire the flight crew separately. There was a standing order with most towers to notify the FAA Air Carrier division whenever our DC-3 or any non-121 large aircraft moved. The DEA also watched all transports closely.

Crows Hunt Ducks

There was one condition to the DC-3 purchase, actually more of a favor. Trammel Crow, whose construction company built every big project in Dallas, used the Three for an annual duck-hunting trip to Louisiana.

The pilot who flew Crow’s jet was also a rated DC-3 pilot. Every year during duck hunting season, Crow’s personal pilot would use the DC-3 to take Crow and his cronies over to some Podunk airport in Louisiana. Their company jet couldn’t get in and out of the small airport’s short runway.

We billed them handily for the trip every year and it helped with the expenses on the old DC-3. They even provided their own insurance and never complained as long as the aircraft was cleaned up and ready to go.

All Mechanics Are Not Equal

Howard was one of the best mechanics I ever knew, but he was a recovered alcoholic. Sure enough, one morning he didn't show up for work and I pretty well guessed what had happened. A couple days later, his wife called to let me know that Howard was in the hospital with bleeding ulcers. When I visited him in the hospital, I assured him if he would get back on the wagon his job would be waiting for him.

Good mechanics were hard to come by and I had hired one who claimed to be working on his A&P, but he wasn't worth a flip. The DC-3 had blown a fuel pump on the left engine and prior to leaving on a two-day trip in the Cessna 310, I told the mechanic to get the DC-3 running because we had a lease trip scheduled when I got back. When I returned, the DC-3 cowlings were strung out on the ground and the left engine still wouldn’t fire. I should have fired the jerk then, but I didn’t.

I called Big John in Paris, Texas, who had worked on my T-6 and knew radial engines. John was a former WW II Army Air Corps mechanic who worked for Brussard, the minister who collected WW II fighters and who had done the Garland air show for me a couple years before. Big John reminded me of John Wayne in looks and manner. He was the only man I ever knew who could hand prop a T-6 when it wouldn't start.

Howard was still convalescing at home and I needed the DC-3 up. When Big John arrived, I explained we had bought a new fuel pump and the problems we were having. I went back to my office and about a half hour had passed when I heard that distinctive sound of the old radial engine crank and fire. The connecting rods make this sort of clanking sound as the engine first starts to turn over. I went back out to the aircraft.

Big John, with a grin on his face said, "They had the fuel pump on back-ass-jack-wards, it was blowing instead of sucking."

One of those management lessons you learn the hard way when you run your own business is it’s cheaper to pay a good mechanic twice the hourly rate of a cheap mechanic because the good mechanic gets the work done a whole lot faster. Luckily, Howard returned to work in a few weeks and stayed sober.

Air Taxi Flights

Returning from a long charter trip including several approaches at major airports and receiving excellent traffic handling, we were approaching GSW and I asked the tower for a straight-in approach. Either the tone of my voice was wrong or the tower operator was having a bad day, but I got a bunch of lip from the approach controller. Turning to Ted in the right seat, I remarked, "Oh, this must be GSW, we’re home."

It was possible, however, that we had messed with them a little too much or they remembered my voice from when I used to fly Cessna 402 side number N04Q. Most pilots who flew the 402, couldn’t resist the temptation to reply to instructions substituting “oh” for the zero and then four Q. Say it real fast, you’ll catch on. This, of course, was always followed by a tort reply from the tower operator explaining that the correct side number on the aircraft was Zero Four Quebec.

Knowing how to talk to the ATC controllers and the tower operators could usually wangle a pilot a straight in approach for landing or at least a reasonably fast landing assignment. There was no place this was truer than at McCarran Field in Las Vegas and probably due to the numerous GA aircraft mixed in with the airline traffic. If you didn’t follow their instructions and expedite, you were going to get what pilots referred to as a penalty approach, that being out to see the mountains and circle for a while until they could work you in.

The first time I flew into McCarran with Ted and he contacted approach control at Las Vegas, he didn't quite understand the controller’s instructions. They vectored him about 20 miles out over the desert and then into a holding pattern before giving him landing clearance. Knowing that the controllers sometimes did this to newcomers, I just sat quietly and waited for him and approach control to work it out.

DC-3 Charters

Jerry, on the other hand, knew exactly how to talk the controllers into almost anything. On one of our DC-3 charter trips into Vegas, we arrived just after dark and I told Jerry I’d always wanted to fly low down the Vegas Strip at night. Jerry got on approach control and talked them into it. We flew at about 1,200 AGL in slow flight, like riding a magic carpet, down the neon boulevard. The casino hotel towers are now almost as high as the clearance we got that night.

Passenger behavior flying charter groups to Las Vegas in the DC-3 was predictable. Going out, everyone was drinking, joking, laughing and playing cards. Coming back, your passengers were quiet, hung over and otherwise not very talkative. That was particularly true, if they weren't coming home a winner.

On the DC-3 flights we often had private pilots, even some of our students on board. They were welcome to come up to the cockpit and visit or watch. Encouraged to do so by her pilot husband, one of the wives came forward. Obviously at a loss for what to say, she asked, “Is everything functioning properly?”

To kid her Jerry, picked up the PA mike and announced to the cabin, "Based on an inquiry from one of our passengers, there will be no functioning on this aircraft tonight."

While waiting on the return trip, I’d play the craps tables. I had perfected a system for taking the odds after reading a book on How to Shoot Craps and over several hours of play, if I paid attention and did the math I’d come out ahead.

An old oil field worker told me one time that a colored gentleman shooter, not exactly his words, would make you a lot of money at the craps table. He also contended that a lady in a red dress was good luck.

I was about to leave the Riviera one evening, but had $20 worth of chips in my pocket I needed to cash in. On my way over to the cashier’s cage, I walked past a particular craps table. Fancy that, and in a casino no less. Walla! A large African American fellow was running the numbers and a little old lady in a red dress was making bets on the side.

What the heck, I’ll just play out this twenty-bucks worth of chips. Stepping up to the craps table, I placed a $5 chip on the Come Line and the cocktail waitress asked what I would like a drink. Normally I did not drink when I was gambling or flying out the next day, but we had another day’s layover. What the heck, “A bourbon and water, please” I replied.

One too many bourbon and waters and a couple hours later, my jacket pockets were full of $5 chips and I had a stack of $20 chips running up to my elbow when I finally decided I ought to quit while I was ahead. At the cashier's cage, I cashed in for a little over $1,200 and took a taxi back to my hotel. Twelve Franklins was not the most I ever won at the craps table, but it was the most I ever won starting with a single $5 chip.

DC-3 Glider

We had been leasing the DC-3 based on tachometer time, but all the other aircraft were rented based on an hour meter reading, so I had Howard install an hour meter in the DC-3. He wired it through the master switch and installed an oil pressure switch just like we had on all the other aircraft.

We had just taken off for Las Vegas one early evening. Jerry was captain and I was flying from the copilot’s seat. Jerry was always screwing with something when he didn’t have anything else to do. We were cruising at 10,000 feet somewhere west of Albuquerque when the subject of the new hour meter installation came up. Jerry insisted that it could be turned off and I explained that I didn't think so because of the way the mechanic had wired it the same as our other aircraft.

Jerry turned off the radio master switch and the hour meter kept running. He turned off the master switch. Lights went to standby power and the electric gyro started spinning down, but the hour meter kept running. Without thinking, he reached up and shut off the overhead all-kill button. At 10,000 feet on a cold black night and with only the props spinning down, a DC-3 really gets quiet when it becomes a glider.

It was the only time I ever recall just hearing the wind noise around the cockpit in a large aircraft. It seemed like about an hour, but was only about two seconds before Jerry turned the all-kill switch back on and added the usual explicative comment.

Several passengers who were pilots came forward to ask if something was wrong and Jerry explained that he had just forgot to switch fuel tanks, nothing was wrong. He sure didn't want to admit to some of the private pilots onboard what he had done.

Fun With The Gooney Bird

Most pilots, who flew the old DC-3, remember the plane with a certain affection. The truth is, they were slow, they were hot in the summer, cold in the winter and they couldn't get up high enough to get over very many thunderstorms. Still, there was something about the old Gooney Birds that pilots loved, myself being no exception. I think it was the feel of the plane.

An odd thing that I remember about the DC-3 was that the fuel switches on the floor were labeled Left Motor and Right Motor, probably because it was originally designed in the 1930s. All modern aircraft are labeled Engine not Motor.

In the Three, it was a lot easier to make a wheel landing and then coast out until the tail wheel came down than it was a full-stall three-point landing, but for short field landings, the full-stall was the best technique. The old saying that there were only two kinds of pilots, those who had ground looped and those who were going to, fully applied to the DC-3. An Air Force pilot with 6,000 hours in DC-3s told me that he thought he’d never ground loop one, but one day he did just that.

Avgas was 35 cents a gallon in those days, so I’d fly the Three for fun sometimes, but because I’d never gotten my type rating, I needed to take a rated pilot with me even though I owned the plane. By now, I had almost as many hours in the Three as a lot of the GA type rated pilots. Of course, nothing like the hours the old main line captains like Jerry had logged.

There was a fly-in at the small town of Denison up by the Red River, the town where President Eisenhower had lived as a boy. I loaded up the neighborhood kids and whoever else wanted to go in the 37F and we flew up to Denison to the fly-in. One of our flight school students who had recently gotten his type rating flew copilot, but basically I flew the hop.

When we taxied up, we were the largest aircraft on the ramp and the old DC-3 attracted a lot of attention. We let the airstair door down and allowed people to tour the plane with its bordello interior. 37F was the hit of the fly-in.

The following Monday when I arrived at the office, there was an FAA Air Carrier inspector waiting. He wanted to know where the DC-3 had gone, i.e.. we had been gone all day. I got a laugh out of it. Apparently we had never gotten high enough to be tracked on radar and ATC assumed the plane had made a low altitude run out of the country and back.

Tree Top Airways

In the early 1970s, Trans Texas Airways, a long time regional carrier in the Midwest, had bought into the Tropicana Casino in Las Vegas during its most profitable years. When the airline went bankrupt, it was put on the market and I looked into buying it. Actually, there wasn’t any buying to the deal. It was only a matter of having a large enough credit line to assume the massive liabilities of the airline.

An idea, which I had conceived about three years earlier, was to develop an airline fleet of jumbo jets with sleeping quarters for the crews like a merchant ship. By using a 24/7 computer scheduling and command center, the fleet of aircraft would be able to rival the oceangoing shipping in the delivery of high-dollar, time-sensitive goods.

Federal Express came along years later with a small package variation on my idea. Air taxi services now pool their resources and using computer scheduling, to compete with the majors. Time, backing and interest ran out before I was ever able to develop the concept. When it comes to commercial and general aviation in the decades of the 60s and 70s, I been there, done that and got the T-shirt to prove it.

Main Concourse

The only American president I recall seeing in person was Richard Nixon. On a political trip to Fort Worth, Air Force One taxied up to the center concourse at GSW. Several others and myself had gathered to watch the President's arrival from the upstairs concourse windows. Nixon exited the front airstair of the Boeing 707 and paused to give his distinctive sideways overhand wave to the small crowd that had gathered.

The President's aircraft had parked on the center concourse. The same spot the Immigration Bureau used to load wetbacks onto a Convair 440 and return them to Old Mexico. I stopped once to watch them load and was visiting with one of the Border Patrol officers. He jokingly remarked, “Some of them will probably beat the airplane back.”

As I watch them load I recalled the words to an old Woody Guthrie song, They won't have a name when they ride that big plane, all they will be called is Deportee.

Fuel Shortage

Most people associate the national fuel shortage or oil crisis with President Jimmy Carter, while in fact the first modern day fuel shortage the U.S. experienced was under President Nixon. Aviation gasoline jumped from thirty cents a gallon to fifty cents a gallon in a matter of a few weeks and became harder to get. The government was trying to keep the airlines flying, but cared less about General Aviation.

We didn’t have our own fuel dump. The flight school and had been purchasing our gas from Butler Aviation who fueled our aircraft by truck. Butler Aviation had always been a pain in the backside. Careless line employees scratched the paint on the wings of the new planes and on one occasion, damaged a wing tip, but things got worse. Flights were delayed because we couldn't get a gas truck to come fuel our planes on a turnaround. Butler only wanted to come once a day to fuel all of our planes.

Via a clause in the original airport contract, Butler had been given the rights to all gas service on the terminal ramp. A small FBO on the field, Mid-Cities Aviation, was allowed to gas aircraft, but only on their own ramp.

While the free press is an essential factor to maintain a democracy, a wise man soon learns not to believe all they read in the newspaper or what’s on television. A firsthand experience I had with this was when I went before the Fort Worth City Council to contest the monopoly on the fuel rights at GSW.

The Fort Worth Star Telegram reported the next day "Mr. Arnold had appeared before the City Council to protest the construction of the new DFW Airport and the closing of GSW Airport, the old Amon Carter Field."

Nothing in the City Council meeting was ever mentioned about the new DFW airport's construction, that I recall.

Rule 23 might work in this situation I thought and so I leased a fuel truck that was licensed on the street and began buying gas offsite a truckload at a time to fuel our own aircraft. This started an all out war between the Fort Worth Aviation Authority, Butler Aviation and FDC. I contended that Butler had failed to meet the terms of their contract by not servicing our planes properly.

Needless to say, I lost the battle and had to give up the fuel truck. However, I was determined not to lose the war and equally determined not to buy gas from Butler anymore, but if I didn't solve the fuel supply problem soon, it was going to have a serious effect on FDC financially.

PART IV. Commercial Aviation

 

Chapter Nineteen

REQUIEM TO GENERAL AVIATION

 

Twas the beginning of the end for the great era of General Aviation as 1980 approached. Soon only the well-to-do would be able to fly airplanes. Lawsuits eventually drove Cessna out of the light aircraft business.

All manufacturers have a responsibility to design the best product they can, but it seemed the person climbing into a plane also needed to assume some of the responsibility for flight safety. Every Tom, Dick and Harry sued Cessna and Piper for any and every crash regardless of the fault until it eventually became impossible to produce a light, single-engine aircraft at a reasonable price for private pilots.

Redbird Airport

The old Goble Aviation facility at Redbird Airport was now closed down and Mobil Oil Company had a fuel farm that went with the facility. We set up a meeting with the Dallas Director of Aviation whose office was at Love Field.

We only wanted to lease the Mobil fuel dump, but the director was trying to force us to lease all the vacant hanger space on Redbird Airport in order to get the fuel rights. The negotiations were going nowhere. Finally, I stood up, informed the director he was unreasonable and may have added something about his family heritage as I stormed out of his office.

As it turned out, Hughes Aircraft, d/b/a Summa Corporation eventually leased the empty hangers to store some of Hughes' old aircraft. They placed security guards around the facility, which effectively rendered about half of the airport a ghost town and the ramp space and the fuel dump were never used. The city got their money, but once again GA got the bureaucratic shaft.

Grand Prairie Airport

The City of Grand Prairie built a nice terminal building and quite a few T-hangers at their new municipal airport south of town. This had been done to justify closing the old National Guard Airport in the center of downtown, which was then sold off for an industrial park. The city had leased its airport to the operator of a small airport in South Fort Worth.

Pappy, the operator’s nickname, wasn’t old he just had that well-worn Willie Nelson appearance about him. He was kind of a cantankerous old fart, but I got him to agree to lease FDC the terminal building and the Enco gas facility. All he wanted was the rental income from the T-hangers. Great, because all I wanted was a dependable fuel supply at a wholesale price.

For the next several months, our instructors would go to Grand Prairie, have the students shoot a few touch and goes and then taxi up to the terminal where our attendant would fuel the aircraft. I gave the mechanic assistant that worked for Howard at GSW, the one I should have fired, the job as attendant to keep from laying him off and called him the airport manager.

Landing offsite sounds anomalous, but actually it worked out well. It allowed the instructor and the student to take a break and discuss the maneuvers they had been practicing. The students liked it because the short runway actually allowed them to spend a lot less time taxiing when practicing touch and go landings. They also received training at an uncontrolled airport as well as the controlled airport at GSW.

Two brothers had been giving clandestine flight instruction out of the Grand Prairie Airport. They wanted to lease the airport and were scheming behind the scenes to get us out. Looking back on the situation, it would have probably been best if I had shut them down when we first took the lease, but I didn't operate that way. For the most part, I’ve always advocated free enterprise.

The airport manager/gas-boy was also not providing good service and it wasn't long before private aircraft owners at the airport began to complain. All of this was mostly my fault because I had little or no interest in the operation and hadn’t supervised the situation at all.

In less than a year, the Nixon fuel shortage began to subside and gas prices went back down a little. The Grand Prairie facility was now more of a headache than it was an asset. Pappy, I am sure, felt he could get more money for the lease out of the other group, so we mutually agreed to terminate our agreement.

I also terminated the worthless manager/employee that I should have fired a long time before that. The facility was an Enco gas station, an old name for the Standard Oil brand and they agree to put some pressure on Butler Aviation at GSW to service FDC better.

In order to obtain credit for our investment and cancel the Enco dealer agreement, it was necessary to inventory all the stock and supplies on site. Late on the afternoon we were to terminate the lease at Grand Prairie Airport, AJ flew over to the facility with me to shut it down. The new operator would take over the following day. AJ was one of those bookkeepers who never let a penny get by her that she didn't account for. When I signed all the paperwork and got ready to fly back to GSW, I couldn't find our trusty bookkeeper/secretary anywhere.

It was getting dark when I started looking around the airport for AJ in the office and out in the hanger, but couldn’t find her. The wind was blowing hard when I walked outside and stood by the fuel truck. I could hear voices, but I couldn’t figure out where they were coming from. Finally, I realized someone was on top of the truck. It was AJ in a tight skirt and high heels, clipboard and pen in hand, making the new gas boy re-check the gallons in the fuel truck with a dipstick.

"Get down off of there," I yelled up to her, "before you fall and break your fool neck. If they’re going to cheat us, they’re going to cheat us. Let’s go, we’re done here!"

Years later the small airport turned into a successful and I am sure profitable operation, but I’m glad I didn’t spend twenty more years of my life fooling with the place.

Mid-Cities Aviation

A builder from Irving named Makus owned Mid-Cities Aviation and had constructed a very expensive all metal maintenance hanger when he put in a gas dump at the north end of GSW. A mechanic who worked on Makus’ Cessna 401 had talked him into backing the Mid-Cities operation when Makus couldn’t find a convenient place to keep his plane. Makus must have been an ol’ country boy because every time he went to say FAA he’d always call it the FFA, like in Future Farmers of America.

Makus had indicated to me that he would be willing to sign over his lease if FDC would buy the hanger. He said with GSW closing in about a year, he’d take $20,000 for it. The hangar had cost three times that much to build it originally, so I financed it at the bank under our holding corporation GSA. The Mid-Cities Aviation sign on the side of the hanger was quickly repainted to read Flight Dynamics. We moved our offices out of the old terminal building and into the cramped quarters of the Morgan building at the Mid-Cities fuel facility.

One thing the old terminal had was plenty of office space and plenty of concrete ramp space. When we relocated our planes to the north ramp, we had to park the DC-3 tail up on the grass with the main gear on the concrete so as not to block the taxiway. Howard, our A&I mechanic, was pleased with his new maintenance hanger that even had a hoist for pulling engines.

Warner Aviation

Love Field in Dallas, lay to the east of GSW just over the Trinity River and was the only remaining major airport in the Metroplex close to the northern Mid-Cities area. Addison airport was to the far north of Dallas and Redbird was to the far south of Dallas. The new DFW International Airport, now under construction, would dominate all the airspace in that area and would necessitate the closing of GSW.

Time flew by as we continued to operate at the Mid-Cities facility, but the day was fast approaching when GSW Airport would close. I began to explore options and Love field seemed our best prospect to stay in business. Warner Aviation, a principal transit facility at Love, had several large hangers. They rented these hangers to high-dollar corporate aircraft.

One hangar had some really nice unused office space available in the front facing Lemmon Avenue. Corporate pilots liked an office to hang out, but no need for contact with the public. The whole front of the building, including a glass front lobby was available, but hanger space was at a premium. Our aircraft would have to be tied down outside. Not anything new for us. Warner would put our planes in a hanger when it stormed based on space available, but charged us by the night for this service. I rented one T-hangar for Howard to use as a shop.

Sabotaged Skyhawk

The afternoon that I flew over to Warner's facility on the north side of Love Field to finalize the ramp and office space lease, I had taken our newest Skyhawk. I left the new white and gold Cessna Skyhawk parked on the transit ramp for a short while. After the meeting, I departed Love Field. It was a beautiful fall day, a pretty afternoon for flying. As I made a tight turn out over the Trinity River, I remember thinking at the time, if one had an engine failure along here, the grassy area inside the river levy would make an excellent place for a forced landing. Looking back on the events to follow, I’ve often wondered why my mind drifted onto that subject that particular afternoon. Was it a premonition of some impending unknown?

The next day was Saturday, another pretty flying day and an active day for aircraft rentals at GSW. I had taken the day off. A young couple and their two friends had scheduled the Skyhawk for a weekend trip. This was the same Skyhawk I had flown to Love Field the day before. As luck would have it, the pilot was a very conscientious individual and prior to takeoff, he noticed that the temperature gauge was rising. He taxied back to the hanger. The instructor on duty grounded the plane and checked him out another aircraft.

On Monday, Howard ran the engine up and said that it appeared to be starting to seize up. There was nothing left to do but to tear the engine down to find the cause of the problem. Later that day, Howard came into my office with something on his finger that looked like oily sand. “What’s that?" I asked.

Howard replied, "Carborundum. What we use in the spark plug sandblaster." What this meant was that someone had intentionally sabotaged the aircraft by pouring the compound into the crankcase. I reported the incident to the FBI as required by law, but they showed little or no interest in the problem.

Everyone makes enemies in business, your competition and dissatisfied customers, but one doesn't normally make the kind of enemies that would intentionally try to kill someone. The short flight from Love Field to GSW may have been just enough time not to damage the engine to the point of failure and the taxi-out time by the rental pilot was not enough time to finish locking up the engine. Fortunately, the combination of the two, in the sequence in which they occurred, prevented an airborne engine failure and a possible crash.

Who were the suspects? I decided to have an independent agency conduct a series of lie detector tests. We asked everyone who might possibly have had an opportunity or motive to do such a thing to take a lie detector test, which included a lawyer/pilot I had a run-in with one time. It became a joke because some of our competitors flew over in their airplanes and volunteered for the test, just to raze me about the incident. The only person who refused the lie detector test was the mechanic I had fired. Truth be known, it was only for him that we were using the others to try to get him to take the test.

However, one other odd thing had occurred a few weeks before the Skyhawk incident. A nondescript fellow had come into our office offering to sell us some type of damage insurance. It wasn't even very clear what he was selling and in retrospect it might have been the old protection racket, but if it was, I was not astute enough to catch on. If it was a protection racket scam, it seemed as though they would have returned to reap the benefits of their effort, but no such return occurred.

The best candidate for the sabotage remained the fired mechanic who coincidently was now employed at the Warner facility flight line where the Skyhawk had been parked. The carborundum was readily available in the maintenance shop and no one would have paid any attention to a line mechanic checking the oil on a transit aircraft.

Thus, the three components of motive, means and opportunity were there. The mystery was never resolved, although I did confront the fired mechanic some time later about the matter and accused him directly of having tried to kill someone. He only stared at me and never responded. Cessna covered our loss under their warranty policy even though we explained to them that the engine had been intentionally damaged. Maybe they were as thankful as we were that no one had gotten hurt.

Hanger For Sale

We moved the aircraft sales and charter operations to the Lemmon Avenue, Love Field facility even before we closed the flight school at GSW. Planes are easy to relocate, but GSA still owned an airplane gas station, a Morgan building and a steel metal hangar. Some suggested the possibility of disassembling the hangar and moving it to a small airport. I looked at several sites including one near Lake Dallas.

One morning, a small rotund man came by our new offices. “You own that hanger out at the old GSW Airport?” he asked and added, “If so, we’d be interested in buying or leasing it. Oh, and the fuel dump too.”

I didn’t know who “we” were, but knew they weren’t airplane people. The gentleman was a representative for the new regional bus line that would service DFW. They wanted the facility as a gas station and repair barn for the new DFW airport buses, Surtran, Dallas/Fort Worth's first attempt at a Metroplex transit system and the forerunner to DART. They offered $60,000 for the gas dump and hanger. I owed $20,000. Boy did they have a deal.

Wow! What this meant was I could stay in business at least another year. Like the farmer who won the lottery and said he figured he could now afford to farm for a few more years.

DC-3 And T-6 First To Go

There were enough parking spaces for our charter and flight school aircraft at Warner, but I had to reduce the number of fleet aircraft keeping only the newest and best airplanes. There was nowhere to park large aircraft like the DC-3, so I placed an ad in Trade-A-Plane.

A New Jersey aircraft broker called wanting the plane shown to his customer and prepaid the round trip. Jerry and I stopped in Dayton enroute and spent the night with Suzie’s folks. Suzie’s dad was a talker like Jerry. I went to bed and they stayed up half the night trying to out lie each other.

We left Dayton early. On arrival, we demonstrated the DC-3 to the dealer’s customer taking him and his young son for a twenty-minute local flight. The broker used the demo to convince the man, who had always wanted a DC-3, to buy a newer model twin. I flew us home while Jerry slept.

One afternoon, two guys showed up, a large heavyset fellow and a short wiry little guy. They were looking for a cargo aircraft to haul electronics back and forth across the Mexican border as part of the border industrialization program. At least that was their story. They had been flying a Twin Beech, but were looking to purchase a DC-3.

Wanting to make the sale, I called Jerry and he came out to the airport to demo the aircraft. I explained that it was our policy to charge them rental, but it could be credited to the purchase price. The plane rented for $125 per hour with fuel and insurance. Jerry would go with them and they could fly the aircraft as much as they wanted. They flew about an hour with Jerry. On their return they said they liked the plane, paid for the flight in cash and left. I never expected to see the two guys again. Figured they just wanted to take a ride in a DC-3.

Two weeks later, they returned with a Safeway paper bag full of $5, $10 and $20 bills, totaling $25,000, the asking price for the DC-3. How was I going to account for depositing $25,000 in cash to our company bank account? The IRS would be on us in a New York minute, so I made up this cock-n-bull story that because we were a corporation we needed to have a cashier's check instead of cash for our records.

The two men left, but returned in a couple of hours with a single $25,000 cashier's check. How they got it I don't know and don't care to know. It was our policy to write a counter ticket on all transactions, even aircraft sales. It was our way of getting the information onto the books, so I wrote out a counter ticket and made a copy of the cashier's check before I deposited the check to the bank.

The two men and Jerry left in the DC-3 for El Paso. Jerry returned the next day by commercial air using his airline captain’s pass. He told me that he had checked them out in the plane and that the big guy was a fairly good pilot. Of course, a pilot is supposed to have a type rating in a DC-3 to fly as pilot-in-command (PIC). Jerry didn’t ask. He left the plane parked in El Paso and contended that they owned the plane now and it wasn’t his or my concern who flew the plane.

Note that these were 1970 dollars. For example, the T-6 which I sold next brought $12,000 and in today’s aircraft market a good T-6 would easily bring ten times that much.

SST Near Miss

Another classic example of the press screwing up an aviation story was the day the Super Sonic Transport (SST) arrived at the new DFW Airport. At the time, Braniff Airline was a prospect for the purchase of the SST. Its arrival time had been announced on the radio and I wanted to see it land.

I departed Love Field and started a slow orbit northeast of DFW waiting for the Concorde to arrive. The new traffic pattern for DFW was the infamous upside down wedding cake. My plane was well clear and more than legal where I was orbiting.

I monitored approach control as the SST came in from the north and made a low pass in front of the DFW east terminal. Approach control advised the SST pilot of a small aircraft south of the airport. Not my location. The small aircraft, a Cherokee 140, had departed Grand Prairie Airport and was not a factor.

The SST made a low pass circled back and landed. The evening news and newspapers carried this story. SST has to make go-around to avoid midair collision with light aircraft.

The low pass to show off the SST to the crowd had been mistaken by the press for a forced go-around.

When I arrived home that evening, I was anxious to tell my wife about seeing the SST land. She met me at the door asking, "Did you hear the Concorde nearly had a mid-air collision with a light aircraft this afternoon?"

“Not true. I was there, I saw the whole thing!” but I was never able to convince her. She had heard it on the television and that made it a fact.

SMB Stage Line

A non-scheduled freight carrier airline on the west side of Love Field hired fairly low time, twin-engine rated pilots for cheap wages. It was a good way to build twin time and they had plenty of takers. The short-coupled fuselage Twin Beech aircraft they flew would ground loop easily. However, the worst aspect of the operation was that when fully loaded, the planes were in a maximum aft center of gravity (CG) condition and if stalled, would enter a spin at the slightest provocation.

Late one afternoon, several of us were standing out on the tarmac at Love Field visiting as a Twin Beech, model 18, belonging to SMB Stage Lines departed southeast out of Love Field struggling to make altitude. At about a thousand feet and a mile out, it rolled over, nosed down and crashed into a residential area. A puff of black smoke rose from the crash site. I jumped in my pickup and raced to the impact scene.

The Beech had gone nearly straight in landing in a small backyard. One wing had hit the back kitchen of a frame house. The tower must have called the fire department because they almost had the fire out when I arrived. There were not enough pieces left of the plane to fill the back of a pickup truck.

The woman in the house said that she had just walked out of the kitchen a few minutes before the plane hit. Results of the crash investigation disclosed that the Twin Beech had been loaded at full gross and had lost power on one engine.

Love Field Aircraft Sales

The Lemon Avenue facility on Love Field was a better location for sales and charter. Our new offices were first class and what we needed for better aircraft buyer contact. What we really needed next was a multi-engine dealership. The Beech distributor was owned out of Austin and they had a satellite facility at Addison Airport, north of Dallas.

The only twin-engine Cessna dealership in the area was Cooper Aviation, also at Addison. Ted Cooper was a nice guy and a true friend to General Aviation. He had been around a long time and even though they didn't sell the numbers of aircraft they could have for the area, Cessna was not going to abandon them as long as Ted Cooper was around.

Beech authorized us as a Pilot Center after we bought several single-engine Beechcraft. We had the single-engine Cessna franchise and a single-engine Grumman American franchise.  However, never obtaining a principal multi-engine dealership was a missing essential to our continued success on Love Field.

The regulation against student pilots departing or landing solo at Love Field was a minor problem. I left the FAA and VA approved flight school at GSW until nearly the airport’s last day of operation. We moved the flight school to Love Field and our instructors had to fly over to Addison or Redbird Airports to solo their student pilots. This wasn't a real serious problem because by now most of our VA eligible students were now working on commercial license, instrument and multi-engine ratings.

There was, however, an additional problem with the Love Field facility. We seemed to attract a lot more of promoter type high rollers. Those that pretend like they’re going to buy an expensive airplane, get the dealer to fly them around for awhile and then never buy anything claiming that it was just a demo. We tried real hard to enforce the rule of renting the aircraft to them and then crediting it back to the purchase price.

What happened more than once was the pilot assigned to fly them was left standing on the ramp as they walked off without paying. The worst offenders were the Dallas white collar Mafia, those that owned restaurants and real estate. If we billed them, they would have some lawyer, who did their dirty work, threaten to tie us up in a lawsuit knowing it would cost us more in time and money to answer their frivolous lawsuits than it would be worth. We usually just wrote off the bill. It was the modern version of, making you an offer you couldn't refuse.

If we were brokering the airplane, we could usually get the owner to absorb the flight time and we would pay for the gas and the pilot’s time. Spare Me The High Rollers.

Beginning Of The End

We had operated a little over a year at 8629 Lemon Avenue when my wife started sounding like the lyrics to the Reba McEntire song Why Haven't I Heard From You. We didn’t have mobile phones, it the ‘70s. Well we did, but they weighed ten pounds. The business had been easy and fun to build and had grown exponentially. Now it was a struggle every month to meet the payroll and pay the bills. We had to make $20,000 a month before I made a dime. All of this was chipping away from my flying and spare time to enjoy what I did make.

FDC had a lot of assets, but cash flow had always been a problem. Like my ol' buddy JD said one time, "If they were selling box cars for a dime a dozen, all I could do is run up and down the track yelling, damn ain't they cheap!"

Those words were never truer than now. What was once fun had become a heavy responsibility. Once again, I stood at the window looking out thinking I could remember a day when I’d have been happy to own just one of those aircraft on the ramp and have the time to fly it for fun. It was time to re-think my choice of careers and I began to consider selling the business.

When the word hit the street that FDC was for sell, I started getting a few inquiries. The first to offer a buy out was some Texas oilman who bore a striking resemblance to Jimmy Dean, the sausage king. He began showing up every day and mostly wasted my time. After a week of this, I arrived at work one morning to find him sitting at my desk with his feet propped up. Someone had let him in my office because he had been going around telling everyone he was the new owner.

Something snapped inside me. I think it was his boots on my Amon Carter desk that had done it. I hadn't seen any money and I was getting tired of his bullshit. "Out," I said to him, "Get yourself up out of my chair, out of my office and don't come back until you can bring certified funds to purchase the place." Needless to say, I never saw the long tall phony again.

Goodbye To Old Friends

To the best of my knowledge, we never lost a student, instructor or rental pilot in an airplane crash. We did, however, sell a Piper Arrow to an airline pilot who flew it into the side of a mountain in Colorado returning from a ski trip. He was on instruments when it happened.

Although all airline pilots are proficient in instrument flying, it is much more difficult to fly instruments in a light plane without a flight director system than it is to fly a modern jet airliner on instruments.

Stan had sold an airplane to a wealthy doctor's son who showed an interest in purchasing FDC when he found out that the business was up for sale. His dad, who owned a prime medical clinic, co-signed for the purchase of the aircraft fleet and we negotiated a reasonable price for the corporation and good will.

It was time to start planning some options for those who had stayed with me over the years. Stan, my salesman, stayed with FDC, but eventually he opened his own aircraft brokerage over at Meacham Field.

AJ had an opportunity to take an executive secretary's job at Empire Central for about what she was making at FDC. As part of her severance pay, she was given clear title to her most recent company car. I lost contact with her, but understand she eventually remarried well.

Ted, my chief pilot, was picked up immediately by one of the corporations we shared the hangar with, as a copilot on their Gulf Stream II. Ted flies a company Lear 24 now and we still stay in touch.

Nevertheless, it was still a little difficult for all of us to break up the old team after being together for the better part of a decade. The buyout went smoothly and I walked away one afternoon and never looked back.

The last time I drove down Lemon Avenue, there was a Baron Thomas Aircraft Sales sign in my old office window. Baron, Web Thomas’ son, had been a teenager when I first took over FDC.

The old GSW terminal building was to be torn down to make way for a planned industrial park. I always claimed I was going to hire on with the demolition crew and help. Of course, I never did. In fact, I was working out-of-state when it was finally torn down. That old terminal building would have made a great airline museum if someone could have gotten behind the project.

Parting With The Twin

The Cessna 310K was paid for and the new owners didn’t particularly want it having recently purchased a relatively new twin from us. I decided to keep it. My wife, daughter and I made a few trips in the Cessna 310 and I really liked owning the ol’ plane. However, without having the luxury of being able to charter or lease the 310, it was a little expensive maintaining, hangaring and providing insurance for the plane.

I advertised the 310 for sale and a buyer with an early model Aero Commander offered me the Commander and more than enough to boot. I made the trade. An Aero Commander twin was a good enough plane, but I never liked them as well as a 310 or Beech Model 55. Only flew the Commander once before I sold it.

Aero Commander Repo

A real estate promoter offered to buy the Commander for $10,000, but was supposedly waiting on a big deal to close. He put up a $3,000 deposit and a sixty-day promise-to-pay note. After two months were up, I went to his office, which I found closed. I tracked the guy down through a mutual friend who had been involved in one of the guy’s shady deals in the past and was more then happy to rat on him. My ship was in New Orleans.

Picking up the phone on a whim, I inquired of the FBO at Lakefront if there was an Aero Commander by that N number parked there. The fellow on the phone told me he could see it through the window from where he was standing.

I called my old friend Jerry and asked him if he would like to take a run down to Lakefront and pick up a plane for me. Jerry could use his airline pass to fly down free on any major carrier. Jerry said he would and that he’d take along a multi-engine student that would like to log the flight time.

Discussing the possibility that the aircraft might be disabled in someway, I asked Jerry to be extra thorough in the preflight of the aircraft. When they arrived at Addison Airport with the Aero Commander, all had gone smoothly. They just went to the aircraft like they owned it, got in and flew back to Dallas. When I tied the plane down I disconnected one of the electrical system cannon plugs so it wouldn’t start.

Some weeks later, I arrived at my new office at Sports Car Center to find the proverbial gentleman-in-a-suit was waiting for me. We had some parts stolen off a Porsche a few days before, but this fellow didn’t look like a city police detective. Maybe an IRS agent, but no, there was a bulge in his jacket, must be FBI and I wondered what he wanted.

The Aero Commander had been reported stolen. There was no question as to the legality of our repossessing the aircraft. I had the signed letter of intent for payment and the FAA registration for the aircraft, which I showed the agent. After we visited briefly, the agent commented that about half of the stolen aircraft reports he followed up on were repossessions and he had already guessed that this was also the case.

A few weeks later, a man called and asked if I’d show him and his son the Aero Commander parked at Addison Airport with the for sale sign on it. I agreed, but put my .380 automatic in the holster and snapped it onto my belt under my jacket. A lot of air taxi and airline pilots like Steve were taking similar precautions since a recent rash of Cuban high-jackings.

The interested parties looked over the aircraft and then asked if they could fly it. I gave them the usual lame excuse about not being covered by insurance, but told them they were welcome to run up the engines or do whatever they needed to do to check it out on the ground.

I exited the aircraft and untied the wing chains, but left the tail chain on the aircraft while they ran up the engines. They were satisfied with the aircraft and the price. The man handed me a personal check, which I took to the bank and exchanged for a cashier's check. That afternoon I met them back at the plane, handed them a bill of sale and shook their hand. All of my suspicions were unfounded, but once burned, twice shy.

The Demise Of Braniff

About this time, one of Braniff airline vice presidents called and asked me to lunch at the Tahiti Room. He made a lot of overtones about my taking an active management part in the floundering Braniff Training Center they were starting. My reputation for excellence in training at FDC had preceded me.

Actually, I quickly figured out that all he was trying to do was pick my brains. Apparently, he had been given the job of setting up the new school and was in over his head. I wasn’t about to give Braniff another free shot at me.

The first time was getting passed over for pilot's class. The second time was when I bought Braniff stock at $5 a share and they filed Chapter 11. My stock dropped to a nickel a share.

Bellanca Indian Jewelry Run

A long time aviation broker at the Plainview Airport had become the main Bellanca distributor for most of the U.S. He had accomplished this by staying with the brand, advertising in Trade-A-Plane and an aggressive marketing organization.

Having owned a Bellanca Viking and having been suitably impressed with the aircraft, I was interested when the Bellanca distributor in Plainview contacted me to go to work for him. Over the next few months, I demonstrated the Bellanca to some prospective buyers in Dallas.

When I went to Plainview on business in my Bellanca Viking demonstrator, I was already halfway to Albuquerque. I’d put the ol’ Viking to good use. It was called the monthly Indian jewelry run, from the reservation direct to Dallas by air.

In the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, Indian jewelry became very popular. My brother had several good contacts with the traders that worked the Indian shops. I’d buy a couple hundred pounds at a time and double my money on arrival with dealers or take it to any flea market on weekends. Mark the price up eight times and make up a big sign that read Indian Jewelry Half Price.

One hot afternoon, leaving Albuquerque, the Bellanca was loaded with two passengers, full gas tanks and a couple hundred pounds of Indian jewelry. The Viking wasn’t going to exactly leap into the air. It was sure nice to have that long former Sandia SAC Air Base runway for takeoff.

A Bonanza taxied into position in front of us and took off. In about three minutes, I was cleared for takeoff. Both planes were cleared for runway-heading departures west bound. By the time we passed over Tijeras Canyon, we were a thousand feet above and a mile ahead of the Bonanza. No one ever had to try to sell me on the merits of a Bellanca.

The Last Landing Of N37F

In the spring of 1989, years after selling FDC and getting out of the General Aviation business, I was at home in the backyard working on an old 1942 Lincoln Continental, which I had been restoring. A young gentleman in a three-piece suit walked up and asked if I had any knowledge of DC-3 aircraft N37F.

"Let me guess," I said, "FBI or IRS?" He showed me his identification. I missed it. He was a treasury agent. He began to ask questions about the DC-3. I told him, “I owned N37F, but I had sold it years ago.”

The agent asked if I had any proof I had sold the DC-3 and I said, “Well maybe.” I went to the garage to dig through several cardboard boxes of old tax records while the agent looked on. What I came up with was an FDC counter ticket with a copy of the cashier's check stapled to it.

The T-Man asked me if he could have the paper work. "No," I told him. "I don’t know where this thing might be going, but you can sure make a copy of what you need."

The agent returned after making the copies and thanked me for my help. "Whoa,” I said, “I've answered all of your questions and given you what you asked for, now tell me what's going on."

Holding back a smile, the agent explained, “Your old DC-3 was found wheels up on a cattle ranch near Truth Or Consequences, New Mexico. There were several bales of marijuana still onboard and the only paperwork in the aircraft was an old registration to Flight Dynamics Corporation.”