Working for FLYING Magazine Was the Ride of a Lifetime

After 25 years of writing the Gear Up column, it's time to step aside.

FLYING contributor Dick Karl is retiring from writing his popular Gear Up column for the magazine after a 25-year run. [Courtesy: Dick Karl]

I remember exactly where I was standing, precisely what time of day it was. Someone had paged me and announced that the editor of FLYING Magazine was on the phone. I thought it was a friend playing a joke. As I looked out over the controlled chaos of the intensive care unit where I worked as an oncology surgeon, I heard a voice claiming to be Mac McClellan. 

I had known him by email, but had never spoken to him. In 1998, I sent a piece “over the transom” to FLYING. It was about the many similarities between surgery and flying. It ran in July of that year—I bought about 50 copies. I had tried to convince Mac that I should be a regular columnist at the magazine that I read with religious devotion since the early 1970s. Mac pointed out that many people are passionate about flying and that some write very well, but that they usually have just one or two great stories in them and a column comes around once a month. So, I resolved to send him a piece a month, just as if I were a regular. 

This Article First Appeared in FLYING Magazine

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Then, several months later, he was on the phone offering me just that—regular space. What a ride it has been.

As a result of that one phone call, my life changed in so many positive ways that it is impossible to catalog the munificence. Suffice it to say that I have flown many airplanes that I would have never known. From careening the Carolinas Air Museum DC-3 (now the Sullenberger Aviation Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina) uncertainly down the runway to a rocket-like takeoff in the Cessna CJ1, my world took on a surreal, happy state. I have flown the Boeing 737, Pilatus PC-12, TBM 850, and Cirrus SR22, not to mention multiple type ratings.  

Encouraged by my friend Mike Shafer, I got a Learjet type rating and ATP at FlightSafety in Atlanta. By then I had a thousand hours in the Piper Cheyenne my wife, Cathy, and I owned—turbine time. This led to part-time Lear 31 first officer fun with a local Part 135 operation. The pay was $200 a day, but I didn’t care (I know, I know). You will never forget the day your captain invited you to the left seat in a Lear on an empty leg from Philadelphia to Tampa, Florida. 

And then, suddenly, aviation acceleration. A Lear 31 captain friend was hired by JetSuite to fly Cessna CJ3s on a Part 135 certificate. He walked my résumé in and, against all odds, I was hired. I closed up shop as a cancer surgeon and headed to indoc, turning 68 years old at a hotel in New Jersey. My sim partner, Phil Smith, was the Air Force’s F15 demo pilot. We were quite a pair and are friends for life.

[Courtesy: DIck Karl]

The three years of flying the rich and famous were among the happiest of my life. I was finally a professional. The experience gave me confidence that I could fly a single-pilot jet, so Cathy and I bought a Beechcraft Premier 1. Oh, my goodness. There were times when I found myself sailing along at FL 410 doing 570 knots over the ground, alone. Unfortunately, the Premier was done in by a bird strike, so we got a Cessna CJ1. A little slower and less sophisticated, but very reliable, we enjoyed that airplane until the insurance industry declared me too old to handle a jet by myself. 

I have stayed up late in my backyard spinning tales with Mac, Len Morgan, and Richard Collins, and I have sent email jokes to FLYING contributing editor Martha Lunken, who once mistook me for another contributor, Peter Garrison, the other bald guy. Collins, the hero whose On Top column I read for about 30 years gave great nurturing support and once ferried me from White Plains to Syracuse, New York, on his way home to Hagerstown, Maryland. It was only 186 nm out of his way. He nailed that crosswind landing in his P-210, too. 

Russell Munson, the great aviation photographer, taught me a thing or two about a thing or two. He showed me what real photography could be about, and he cautioned me about written hyperbole. “You only get to write about one sunset per year,” Munson counseled after I had written an especially maudlin piece about the death of a friend in a King Air 200. Riding around Oshkosh with him on a golf cart has been one of my life’s greatest pleasures.

FLYING contributor Les Abend took me on a four-day trip as he flew his 757. I always thought I wanted his job, and this experience gave me a chance to separate fantasy from reality. I remember how tired I was when we pulled into Chicago O’Hare, only to realize we had another leg to Orlando, Florida, to go. The sunset was spectacular, but the fatigue was real.  

As mentioned, I got to know Morgan before he died. It turned out that Len and Margaret lived near me in Florida, and we had several lunches and dinners where I got to hear those magnificent stories from the past. I also noted his attractive daughter whom I introduced to my friend Rob Haynes from Southwest Airlines. I got to be the best man at their wedding. All because of FLYING Magazine. 


The author’s first FLYING article in July 1998. [Courtesy: Dick Karl]

On a lifeguard flight from Tampa to Birmingham, Alabama, to watch a heart harvest for transplant, I ended up as the first assistant in the operation. Once the heart had been loosed from its attachments, it was in my hand, cold and quiet like a frozen bird. As we boarded a Lear 25 for the trip back to Tampa, I wrote that we had eight hearts and seven souls on board with 400 nm to go. These are not everyday experiences. 

It was my role as the voice of the reader that I appreciated the most at FLYING. Whereas all the other editors made their livelihoods in aviation as writers, photographers, or pilots, I was the lone guy working a day job to pay for the habit. In this role I felt more like a reader than a writer. 

It has never been far from my mind that I was enjoying the privilege of writing for the one venerable magazine that had sustained the likes of Ernest Gann, Richard Bach, Gordon Baxter, Morgan, Collins and McClellan. Every pilot knows these names. What a thrill for me to pretend to be among them. 

Readers were the best. For all of you who sent so many wonderful, caring, concerned, and thoughtful letters, my undying thanks. When I wrote about semiretirement or a momentary visual disturbance, the advice and concern was overwhelming. When I flirted with buying a Cessna Mustang jet (before I realized I didn’t have the money), people wrote by the scores urging me to “just go for it.”  

For some perverse reason, I also took pleasure in the angry letters and would often develop a pen pal relationship with those who wrote in to decry my airmanship, unforgivable good luck, or profession. I enjoyed their challenges and learned a thing or two about humility as a bonus.  

It is time. In stepping aside from writing this column, I won’t lie and tell you I won’t miss it. I will. I have had a great run, and I thank all of you—readers, teachers, mentors, and most of all, pilots—for the ride. I’ll listen for you on the frequencies, and I’ll look for you on the ramp. May we all have tailwinds.


This column first appeared in the April Issue 957 of the FLYING print edition.

Dick Karl

Dick Karl is a cancer surgeon who appreciates the beauty and science involved in both surgery and flying. Dick’s monthly Gear Up celebrates the human side of flying. He writes about his enthusiasm for both the machines and the people who fly and maintain them.
Pilot in aircraft
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