For 34 years I have been able to tell everyone that my job was to fly airplanes and write about it. I have been the luckiest pilot in the country.
I would like to say that, as a kid, I dreamed about working for Flying, but that's not true. Such a thing was so far beyond my dreams it didn't cross my mind. So how did I end up in the left seat of the world's most famous aviation magazine for all of these years? It was the usual way that most of us end up where we are, a series of unexpected and seemingly unrelated events that gave us a chance that we never expected to have.
The dream of becoming a pilot did come naturally, and I can't remember a time when I didn't want to know how to fly. My dad is one of those linear thinkers for whom all things mechanical are second nature. He had his A&P — they called it A&E then — mechanic's license before high school graduation. The Navy snatched him out of high school and sent him to Wisconsin to study aeronautical engineering. He understood how airplanes were designed and built and how to keep them flying.
My father never had the resources to get a pilot's license though he did make attempts, but his involvement with airplanes rubbed off on me and my brother, John, from before either of us can remember. We built dozens of models that inevitably crashed. Maybe that's where my intense interest in understanding the root cause of aviation accidents originated.
Those of us who grew up in the late 1960s faced a world that was unrecognizable from only a few years earlier. Vietnam and the draft, of course, loomed over everything. I had always expected to be in the military only because all of my male ancestors as far back as anybody knew had been. I had hoped to fly in the Navy or Air Force, but my eyes didn't meet the better than perfect standard of the day. The Army had no such qualms about vision, at least when it came to helicopters, and suggested that I would look good in the right seat of a Huey. In 1969 that didn't hold great appeal.
Instead, I stayed in school and learned to fly on my own at a tiny airport in the eastern suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio. I needed a job and stumbled into sports writing at a small daily newspaper. Learning to fly had always been at the top of my list of things to do, but writing was a pure accident that would turn out to be the key ingredient in the wonderful life I have enjoyed.
I bought a beautiful white Cessna 140 that had "metalized" wings. The structure of the 140's wing was aluminum, but the frame was covered with fabric fastened to the wing ribs with hundreds of clips that looked like the bobby pins girls used to pin up their hair. The pins would corrode under the fabric, and the fabric would deteriorate in the sun, and the whole fabric covering process had to be repeated every few years under normal circumstances. A solution was to replace the fabric with sheet aluminum, and we called that metalized.
The Cessna was three years older than I was, having been built in early 1946. I paid $3,000, all the money in the world at the time. But owning the 140 was important because I was on my own, free to go out and learn, and scare myself. Rental pilots don't have the same unfettered opportunities — or risks — because the airplane owners are looking over their shoulders and putting at least some boundaries on their flying. When you fly into the whiteout of a Great Lakes pop-up snow shower with nothing but an ancient turn-and-bank gyro to stay right side up, you learn a lot about flying, if you live through it. I did. Luck more than skill was on my side as the 140 taught me to fly.
The newspaper sports writing gig was working OK, and I moved on to a larger daily where, at age 23, management put me in charge of the sports department. With a staff all in our 20s, we wrote hundreds of thousands of words to fill seven editions every week. The paper had an odd production schedule of publishing afternoons Monday through Friday, and then mornings Saturday and Sunday. So on Friday we went to work twice. The morning deadline was 7:30 a.m., and the deadline for the Saturday edition was 2 the next morning. I don't remember sleeping much, and in the fall I would cover a high school, college and pro football game in the span of about 36 hours.
The Associated Press named me Ohio sports writer of the year in 1975, which was nice, but that was also the year that I had a key role in a libel case that would eventually be heard by the Supreme Court, something very rare for First Amendment issues. My newspaper lost. The case is Milkovich vs. The Lorain Journal, if you care to Google it. The case turned on the use of the word lie. If I had written that the subject was a big fat bag of wind and you can't believe a word he says, that would have been OK. Lie wasn't. That brings interesting meaning to a recent outburst during a State of the Union speech.
What I didn't know at the time is that the endless hours at the typewriter describing all sorts of games, and as many hours as I could find flying around in the 140, were the setup that eventually got me the best job any pilot can have.
The break came when some of my buddies spotted a "blind" ad in Editor & Publisher magazine. The unnamed company was looking for a person with a combination of flying and writing experience. Writers were a dime a dozen, and a dime is about what I remember being paid by the paper. There were plenty of pilots too, with the war having finally ended after the military had trained thousands. But darn few had been able to combine writing and flying as I had done out of sheer happenstance.
I responded to the ad, and it turned out to have been placed by the people at Collins Radio in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. At that time Collins had an extensive marketing communications department and created most of its promotional material in-house. Tony Huebsch ran the operation and was convinced through long experience that writers who also knew how to fly were the most successful at explaining the technology and rapid advances in Collins avionics equipment.
