A Long and Satisfying Journey
By Richard L. Collins
October 2008
 I started flying with my father when I was just a little kid. I started flying as pilot-in-command on October 25, 1951. I started writing magazine articles in 1956 and became an employee of Air Facts magazine on July 22, 1958, and have been on a magazine masthead every month since then. I've flown over 20,000 hours and have had the satisfaction of flying and writing about virtually all of the general aviation airplanes and subjects that have been around.
Most of all I have enjoyed and appreciated having general aviation pilots fly along with my writing all these years. For that, I am eternally grateful. I also thank all my kin, colleagues, friends, acquaintances, competitors, air traffic controllers, FBOs, critics and everyone else that I met or talked to along the way. All of you do good work and are necessary to those who ply this trade.
The main person I am going to acknowledge is my wife, Ann. She is the only person in the world who flew with me for the whole 50 years during which I was dealing with a magazine every month. The picture shown here resides on our mantle, with christening pictures and such. It depicts the beginning of our journey and was taken a few days after we left Little Rock on July 22, 1958, in our Piper Pacer to move to New York for me to begin my career in the aviation magazine business. (She ditched the cigarettes a few years later, as did I.) The picture was taken by my father, Leighton Collins, at the airport in Hendersonville, North Carolina. I followed in his generous footsteps in this business.
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And I hope that somewhere today there is a 24-year-old guy sitting on a wheelpant of his airplane, with a loving and supporting hand on his shoulder, looking forward to replacing me and having as much fun in the next 50 years of his life as I did in the past 50 of mine. I can't imagine a finer career. I'll be around for a while and might visit with you some more on these pages but not on a regular basis.
Once more, thank you.
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