Sharing Some Memories of Another Hero of Mine

How about we discuss a name you don’t often hear in tales about iconic aviation heroes? 

I wish I knew even more details about this intriguing man, but there’s more than enough to share and, I hope, catch your interest and admiration. Hopefully, any of my readers who knew or worked with Bill Conrad could fill me in with those early details. One thing’s for sure: I’m the only living person around Lunken Airport (KLUK) old enough to remember this gentle, talented and brilliant giant of a man. 

Conrad was born in New York in 1909, and at 15 his family moved to Detroit. Like many youngsters of that era, he became enthralled when aviation was still new and Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic in 1927. So, Conrad learned to fly and would be an active pilot for 59 years as well as a teacher, inventor, and designer until his death in 1989.

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He had type ratings in an incredible number of aircraft and, as a pilot and designer, was always at odds with the FAA (a man after my own heart). I laughed out loud when, after his death, I was at the FAA Academy in Oklahoma City, and our class toured the Airmen Certification branch. On a wall, prominently displayed, was a huge, framed photograph of my hero with all his certificates. I am sure he was smiling from somewhere. 

Earliest records report, as a young pilot, he crashed an airplane in Lake Michigan when he lost all instrumentation in icy clouds. His early model pitot tube had iced over. Conrad survived and invented a new type of heated pitot tube—for which we are all grateful. 

Although his 1998 Elder Statesman of Aviation Award says he was Pan Am’s first director of flight training in Miami, airline’s records don’t support that claim. But Conrad did found his company, Airline Training Inc., in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. As incredible as it sounds, multiple sources state that he and his instructor pilots would train an incredible 26,000 airline pilots in the next 20 years. Bill could fly any airplane. I saw his multipage pilot certificate, and it read like a life story—which it really was.

Beginning in the 1950s and ’60s, he was a friend of my then husband, Ebby Lunken, who was part owner of a Beech distributorship called Queen City Flying Service, and of Nelson Rokes, the longtime chief pilot and director of the Procter & Gamble Co. flight department. When Ebby hired him to train and/or check out pilots in our Lockheed 10 Electras (Amelia Earhart vintage—not the turboprops) for his Midwest Airways operation in 1960, Conrad had also been regularly checking P&G pilots as well as those of several other large corporate flight operations at Lunken and other locations.

Sadly, in 1960, one of Conrad’s pilots was training and flight checking the crew of a Champion Paper Co. Lockheed PV. The airplane was above a thick overcast, and there are conflicting reports about what happened—maybe a “canyon approach.” But the big Lockheed stalled and spun in from about 10,000 feet. It crashed and burned, killing all three on board, in a suburb just northeast of Lunken and right next to a large Catholic grade school.

You can imagine the bad publicity that ensued, and this was about the time companies were developing simulators for airlines and large corporate operators. So many former corporate customers switched to using these newly developing simulators instead of actual and potentially dangerous flight checks.

An interesting aside: A young pilot named Al Ueltschi came from rural Kentucky to Cincinnati in his WACO 10 named Little Hawk. Ueltschi gave up barnstorming and was hired as a flight instructor at the Queen City Flying Service at Lunken Airport. On one occasion, he survived falling out of his airplane on an instruction flight, parachuting into a briar patch while his student landed safely on his own. Ueltschi went on to fly for Pan Am but left to found Flight Safety International in 1951 after seeing that corporate pilots weren’t receiving the same rigorous training as airline pilots.

Despite the Lockheed PV accident, Conrad was still active as an examiner and instructor with many customers. He would teach me to fly our single-pilot Lockheed Lodestar in three days. Ebby dropped “Frazier” and me in Fort Lauderdale and left on the airlines for a golf outing.

Three days later and 5 pounds lighter, I took the multi-ATP and type rating check ride with Bill. At the end, he patted me on the shoulder and said, “You’re a fine little pilot. That’s it, just take me home to FTL.” I breathed a huge sigh of relief, wiped the sweat out of my eyes, and went roaring down the runway. As we lifted off, the left engine “failed,” and I yelled, “You son of a [expletive]!”

But it was a great lesson in what Bill always taught—that on every takeoff in a multiengine airplane, you know one is going to quit, just not which one or exactly where.

So now I traded my single ATP for a multiengine and type rating in that beautiful Howard Hughes-era Lockheed 18.  

Bill Conrad is probably known to more pilots these days as the guy who engineered the increased gross weight and load-carrying capabilities on popular Beech 18s. Initial Beech production models of the 18A (C45) in 1939 had a gross weight of 6,700-7,500 pounds. Conrad’s company increased the maximum takeoff weight (MTOW) of Beech 18s in several stages during the late 1950s and early ’60s until its kits produced in 1962 were capable of a gross weight of 10,200 pounds. 

The “Conrad Ten-Two” included redesigned landing gear doors, improved wingtips, increased horizontal stabilizer angle of incidence, and other drag-reduction refinements. The airplanes were a popular choice for operators like the CIA during the Vietnam War.  

In June 1989, a year before his death, Bill made an historic flight at Fort Lauderdale Airport in his hydrogen-fueled modified Grumman Cheetah. He believed hydrogen-powered aircraft were more environmentally friendly and addressed the problem of potential crude oil shortages. The flight predated later hydrogen flight projects by companies like Airbus, which conducted its first full hydrogen-powered flight in 2023. But it was the ultimate “modifier” Bill Conrad who laid the significant early groundwork. 

The last time I saw him was at dinner with Ebby and me at an elegant restaurant in Cincinnati. As he spoke passionately about his latest project, I knew why I so respected and loved this man. 

This column first appeared in the December Issue 965 of the FLYING print edition.