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I didn’t initially intend for this be so lengthy. What began as a simple comment on a story I read in Air Facts Journal, entitled “Flying with the Old Breed,” took on a life of its own, and somehow morphed into a full-blown rambling editorial. Perhaps a few of you will find it interesting, undoubtedly a few will disagree with the overall premise, but it certainly was a walk (flight) down memory lane for me. So, indulge me for a few minutes as I step onto my soapbox to share some of my experiences and observations regarding my chosen pastime and career.
I don’t think enough positives can be said about the knowledge and wisdom passed along to their younger students by the old salts of aviation, the gray-haired CFIs who flew in wars, learned to fly in what were essentially go carts with wings, and in general were on hand to witness aviation back in what some might call, a better time. Today, those pilots are mostly long gone, and while there are a lot of us around who were trained by them, I cannot help but look at today’s flight training environment and find that it is sorely lacking in overall experience. While I was once a young CFI, full of enthusiasm and FAR/AIM knowledge, eager to build hours for “the majors,” looking back I wonder if, with my meager 300 hours and freshly inked CFI certificate, I had any business teaching others the wonders of aviation. I tend to think not, but then again, my overall experience in aviation at the time probably gave me a bit of an advantage in the teaching department over most of today’s young CFIs, most of whom didn’t have the opportunities I had.
They say you don’t know what you don’t know, but I tried my best to teach people how to fly, and to pass on as much knowledge as I could from the instructors I had flown with over the years. Like so many of us who were CFIs when we were younger, I have ex-students who are captains at major airlines, a few who fly “mister big” all over the world, and one even who is a well-known figure in aviation journalism, although he might scoff at my putting him on such a pedestal. However, like many who have commented upon the article I referenced above, I too had the benefit of older instructors who, as the saying goes, had probably forgotten more about aviation than I will ever know.
Aviation, for me, began when I was a small child, my father taking me to airports and setting me on, in, and around all manner of small airplanes. My first actual ride occurred when I was seven, in a Piper Colt my dad had rented, and then later, owned. I was completely hooked. Flying with my dad, sitting on boat cushions while peering intently over the glare shield, I was taking off and landing by the time I was 12 years old. While growing up I often spent afternoons on the couch looking at airplanes, my reading material consisting of a few, random issues of Flying magazine out of my dad’s collection, which contained every issue from September 1945 to the mid–‘70s. My dad used to get a kick out of taking his young son to the airport, amazing the old boys with my ability to tell the difference between a Waco (and pronounce it correctly), and a Stearman. There aren’t many pilots today, younger than age 50, anyway, who can do that I would imagine.
Life as a child was all about aviation, thanks to my dad. He had turned 18 in December of 1945 and thus missed out on any opportunity to join the military and fly. Instead, he joined his brother’s electrical contracting business and flew Cubs and Champs and whatever else he could get his hands on. When the Korean conflict rolled around, he tried to join the service, but was oddly deemed 4F, being told he had asthma, a condition I never knew my dad to have.
The summer of 1975, he took me to a movie called Nothing by Chance, about Richard Bach and a few friends trying to discover if the old barnstorming days could be recreated. The movie featured dad’s favorite airplane, the Travel Air 4000. A few years later, one of the pilots in the movie brought his airplane to town and gave rides at the county fair. I am told I pestered my mother incessantly until she took me to the airport, whereby we went for a ride with a movie star, Capt. Mac. Years later I was reconnected with him, almost by accident (chance?), and once again went for a flight with him in the same airplane, this time with my wife sitting next to me. Who says you can’t go back?
When I was 14 my dad bought a 1946 Fairchild 24 from a friend of his. Painted in the silver and yellow of pre-war USCG aircraft, N81234, having once been based at our local airport, was now hangared on the other side of the country. When the deal was done, dad, ever the romantic, took me out of school for two weeks, saying, “c’mon, you’ll learn more doing this than sitting in a classroom.” What followed was a two-week pilgrimage across the US in the Fairchild. Years later he would grin when telling people of the journey, often adding in how shortly after departing the first day he looked down and saw the pentagon directly below. Dad didn’t believe in radios, and anything over a thousand feet was “high.”
When I was 14 my dad bought a 1946 Fairchild 24 from a friend of his. Painted in the silver and yellow of pre-war USCG aircraft, N81234
Over the next couple years, he and I flew the Fairchild to all the fly-ins in our area, sleeping under the wing, landing in the grass, reliving what he considered to be the best years of aviation. I was nearing the age when it was time for me to start flying myself, and dad thought it would be fun for me to solo on my 16th birthday. Being firmly in the anti “spam can” crowd, he wanted me to do it in the Fairchild.
Bill was an “old” (to me) guy with a gray crew cut, large nose, and even larger smile. He spoke with a loud voice, and items of importance were often initiated with a loud, “and the damn…’
What I needed though, was a CFI. And a CFI he found. I was introduced to Bill, an “old” (to me) guy with a gray crew cut, large nose, and even larger smile. He spoke with a loud voice, and items of importance were often initiated with a loud, “and the damn…’ (insert sage aviation wisdom here). He was warm, friendly, patient, an amazing stick, and sure enough, on my 16th birthday I found myself taxiing toward the runway without him, he standing in the grass next to the taxiway, smiling broadly.
Bill and I only flew a few times after that, and for reasons I can’t quite remember I usually flew with one of the other instructors at the Cessna Pilot Center where I pumped gas and washed airplanes while in high school. When I got my private certificate at age 17, I was the only kid in school who could fly. If by some miracle any of the girls I took flying read this, your names are still legible in my logbook to this day.
As a sidebar to that, while I was preparing to take my private pilot written exam I spent hours upstairs in the classroom above the office, studying with a fellow student. He was quiet and unassuming, and I enjoyed his company. We would plan flights, ask each other test questions, and I looked forward to studying with him whenever our schedules would allow it.
One day I showed up at work to find everyone in a tizzy. It turned out that “Tony”, the student I’d been studying with, was an escaped convict, a convicted spy, apprehended by the FBI that morning at a local drive-in restaurant. They made a movie about him staring Timothy Hutton and Jeff Spicoli. No one asked me for a cameo.
During that same summer, a movie was being filmed in a neighboring town. I was also pumping gas and throwing bags for the small commuter airline in town and the canisters of footage would be driven to our airport where I would load them on to one of the Cessna 402s the airline used to run people and cargo back and forth to the big city. If you’ve ever seen An Officer and a Gentleman, I carried the original footage for probably most of that movie. Never met Debra Winger though — pity.
But I digress. Sadly, Bill and I lost contact once I graduated high school and I never had the opportunity to see him again. When I learned a few years ago that he had passed in 2011 I was saddened, of course, but suddenly curious. I knew he had been in the military, but that was the extent of my knowledge about him. I had to know more.
Thanks to a little Google-Fu I was able to develop a picture of the man, although information was very scarce. As it turned out, Bill was indeed ex-military. Air Force, to be exact. He entered the aviation cadet program in 1942, flew B-17s in Africa, F-84s in Korea, flew most all the century fighters, commanded a fighter squadron, was second in command of Operation Skoshi Tiger in Vietnam, and later commanded a tactical air wing in Europe. He retired out of the Pentagon in 1974 as a Brigadier General. He was “the man,” although to teenage me he was just Bill. I don’t have many heroes, but he certainly tops the list.
I had the privilege of flying with some excellent instructors over the years. One who I thought very highly of was a calm, easy-going guy named Jim. Jim was a professional instructor, and later became a DPE. During the summer of 1985 he took me under his wing and had the patience of a saint while I blundered my way through to my instrument rating. I can still hear him, nattily attired in wool socks, Birkenstocks, and Serengeti Driver sunglasses, asking quietly, “when do you want to go again?” Over the next few years, I worked with him on my commercial and multiengine as well. I met up with him again in 2012 while passing through on a flying vacation, and I promised to return and fly with him once more for old time’s sake so he could unlearn me of all my bad habits. He laughed and said he’d love to. Unfortunately, he passed away last year, and I never got the chance.
Another amazing instructor I got to work when I was in college was also named Bill. This Bill was a captain for Alaska Airlines and was the one who recommended me for my ATP. I was a working CFI at the time and I remember flying along with Bill in the school’s Beech Duchess, practicing for the checkride. On one flight Bill said something that has always stuck with me, something I have passed along to many other pilots over the years. He said, “Kurt, you are an excellent 50-foot pilot”. Confused I asked what that meant. He said, “you hold your altitude beautifully, but you’re either 50 feet high or 50 feet low and if you can hold it that well, do it AT the altitude!” If you read this, Bill, thank you! This goes along with what my boss at the time kept telling me when we’d fly together, “Centerline”. “Centerline”. “Centerline”. Thanks Ron. Instruction like that made a difference.
I told you all that to tell you this. Today’s flight instruction pales in comparison to what many of us seasoned pilots experienced. I know that will not sit well with some, and that’s ok, a man’s entitled to his opinion.
These days I cannot help but feel the current generations of pilots are being cheated out of the knowledge these old(er) instructors passed along to us. Sure, today’s CFIs can recite the FAR/AIM, chapter and verse, but so often they were taught by a young CFI, who was taught by a young CFI and so on and so on. Their radio work is often atrocious, their stick and rudder skills lacking, and bad habits are being passed along with no one there to correct them. While the FAA thinks this blind leading the blind method of teaching people to fly is appropriate, I disagree. Not in the aviation world of today.
When I talk to friends at the airlines who fly with many of their company’s new pilots, I see a lot of head shaking, face palming, and hear words of disgust, as well as sadness. What has happened? Flight schools with call signs, teaching students to say “V1 Rotate” in a 172, flying bomber sized patterns, instructors and students with epaulets, excessive and incorrect radio calls (radio checks anyone?), all performed with the absolute certainty that they are doing things correctly and that we “old” pilots don’t know what we’re doing. Such are the attitudes of today’s youth, I guess.
Whenever someone asks me about learning to fly, I always tell them this. Find a small country airport with no tower. Find an old taildragger to train in, a Cub or a Champ. But more importantly, find an old instructor, preferably one who wears a checked shirt and a trucker hat (suspenders optional), who has most likely forgotten more about how to fly an airplane than most of us will ever know. Learn to fly the airplane, to feel it, to listen to it, to talk to it. Leave the glass, the standard callouts, the flows, and the epaulets for another day. Flying is a joy, and it should be done with skill and precision. You can give me some tools and some wood, and I’ll make you a table. But give Norm Abram that same pile and he’ll make you a masterpiece. Be like Norm.
Anyone (almost) can fly an airplane, but few do it exceptionally well. Strive to be a craftsman, the airplane your tool, the sky your canvas of choice. Talk to the older pilots at the airport, the guys sitting in their hangars solving all the world’s problems or polishing their airplanes. It’s often amazing the backgrounds they have, the stories they tell, the airplanes they’ve flown, and places they’ve been. Learn from them, befriend them, cherish them. The older pilots at my airport who, some in their 80s, call me a kid, love to tell stories of their exploits, some probably true, some even aviation oriented. At the same time, most of the younger students I see never look over as they taxi by, never wave, never stop by to say hello and talk airplanes. It’s like they are in a completely different world. It’s kind of sad, in a way. So next time you’re at the airport and you see a gaggle of old men with checked shirts and trucker hats, sitting around jawing, talk to these guys. Better yet, take them flying. You might just be amazed at what you can learn from “the old breed”.
- I Learned About Flying from Him - November 27, 2024
Nice piece, Kurt. Great to see your writing chops are almost as good as your flying skills–haha.
Aw shucks. Thanks, my friend.
I was forced to retire from instructing due to a very bad back and an ill-advised back surgery that left my left leg barely functioning. I became a CFI late in life at age 55 so I am a “low-time” CFI with over 22 years at that profession.
After getting my Commercial license I flew freight, mostly at night, in a wide range of aircraft including DC-3’s. All the aircraft in this southern Vermont carrier were hand flown including the ‘3. Autopilots weighed too much and sacrificed payload which easily converted into dollars.
During those five years as a part-time SIC, I learned from 30,000+ hour Captains how to handle severe icing, crazy winds, delays caused by ATC rerouting, ramp checks, the real importance of CG loading of freight, and the rare unexpected maintenance issues to mention a few experiences I used as examples after I became a CFI. The ‘kids’ I instructed got to hear real life experiences that most pilots would never be exposed to.
As a taildragger the DC-3 was a handful on the ground anytime the winds exceed 10-15 kts; on occasion it took both pilots on the pedals to hold the rudder where we wanted it. Fortunately, as we hand flew all sorts of approaches including multiple NDB approaches in Canada, the old “Gooney Bird” was solid, stable and a joy to fly. Landing in a stiff cross wind was an entirely different matter with the “barn door” rudder the real control that had you dancing on the pedals! Everything I learned from those old warplanes I taught including how a pilot should be using their feet!
Needless to say, like many older CFI’s, I could go on and on about my
experiences. I really just want to say that Kurt’s article is right on point. The only thing I would add is to say that every pilot should find an older CFI to rely on as a mentor.
Paul T. Carroccio, COMM., ME Land/Sea, Inst. & CFI
Great piece!
I, too, had an old Bill as my first CFI. He handed me a pile of NTSB reports on fatal accidents and told me to read them and figure out if there was a common denominator. There was: pilot error and usually fuel starvation. At my first ground school session he asked me how and why an airplane flies. An hour later we moved on. He was the first of many CFIs and a wonderful mentor.
I earned a tailwheel endorsement in a Champ from an unassuming CFI that I later learned had been flying since he was 14 and had over 5000 hours, as he put it, upside down. He taught me to feel the airplane.
As the author said, seek out those old guys!
Kurt,
I knew the guy your Dad and bought the Fairchild from!
As a tailwheel Instructor, I totally get what you’re saying about the new instructors not realizing what they don’t know. It’s all about getting to that airline job, period. Flying skills be damned provided they can run the avionics. Outr faasteam programs are addressing just that, the lack of stock and rudder skills and systems knowledge.
Well written!
Mike
Kurt,
Carl Swickly once owned your Dad’s Fairchild. Maybe that’s who he bought it from.
Mw
You are correct. Talk about a man who had an amazing career!
Wonderful article; and I certainly appreciate the value of my PP training from a career airline pilot (who was, at the time, most senior MD-80 pilot at AA). He owned a farm with a 2300 grass strip that I stored my 22′ wooden Chris Craft at during the winters. I would always wander wistfully through his hangars when I took the boat out there and went to pick it up in the spring. One day he asked if I wanted to learn how to fly. Are you kidding me? So the adventure began in his Citabria 7ECA; he introduced me to the horizon with the use of a piece of masking tape on the windscreen; all landings were power off abeam the numbers (but no wheel landings). When we began the training he suggested I read Wolfgang Langewische’s “Stick and Rudder”. I don’t think that’s on the syllabus at most of flight schools these days.
Of course, the problem in my view is that by now many of the old school guys are out of aviation (if they are still with us at all). Phil passed away probably 10 years ago. So, it’s hard to find these instructors, but certainly not impossible. I’ve been fortunate to maintain relationships with very experienced guys for quite a few years now (I’ll give the American Bonanza Society a plug here, as that has been my resource).
Thanks for writing the article!
My dad’s old copy of Stick and Rudder is in my bookcase. Should be required reading. Thanks for the reminder to go read it again!
I have a leather-bound, signed copy in my possession! It is sitting right HERE!
Beautifully done!! Although essentially the dates and names are different, you just told my life story. And you are right, we are damned lucky.
My first instructor was also a Bill, and also my dad. We were also fortunate to have an ex-military B-25 instructor, and AG pilot in our midst. CJ was also a DPE at the time, 1950s and always had a cigar in his mouth, normally not lit. My first solo was in a PA-12, mast 16 but not 17 and private shortly after 17. I did not get my CFI until late in life and really enjoyed training until mixing with the 141 school personnel. Must agree with your thought patern and I still teach “feel the airplane” and not numbers. Current DPEs do not always agree with this method. Hope you have many successful years to come.
Kurt, very nice flight down my memory lane. I’m one of those old farts now, the kind I used to look up to when exiting the blue and yellow link trainer at my original flight school under the palms trees in Opa Locka, Florida (KOPF) in 1975 striving to earn my instrument rating. Does “Needle/Ball/Airspeed”, mean anything to anyone today? You should have seen the looks on the new hire first officers trying to get checked out in the DC-9 in the sim sessions (all “steam gauges”, of course) after graduating from the regionals to the majors after learning everything in a glass cockpits. Of course I’m so old now even the DC-9 are pretty much antiques. But I digress, I’ve been retired from the majors for over a decade, earned typed rating in two, three, and four engine transports over the years and learned from those you describe in your article.
Times change and progress inevitable…..the “every cross country flight begins with a straight line on a chart”….turns into, “request GPS direct to…”, has changed the flying world and I’m convinced, we’re not going back. Will there be gaps in the young aviators training, yes, but I never needed to learn how to sync the props on a four engine transport aircraft like my Dad did, so I had gaps in my training according to him. Progress, I guess.
It’ll all come down to aeronautical decision making (ADM), making the right decision at the right time, at the right place, every time, that will keep the youngsters alive to become the old farts like you and me. The flat panel magic won’t get the ice off, nor suspend the turbulence in the thunderstorm, nor get the wind to blow straight down the runway, but good decisions made early, at the right place and time will allow these freshly minted aviators to gain the experience that will turn them into the seasoned professionals they yearn to be.
Again, excellent article,
Andrew
I consider myself to be one of the most fortunate pilots in the world! Maybe one of eight, actually.
I was an Airport Kid that could frequently be seen cruising the GA hangar areas at the airport or pestering the mechanics in the several hangars where maintenance was going on. I spent many hours at the end of the main runway with my Radio Shack Aviation radio hanging out of the window by its antennae watching for anything that would come in. One day I was cruising the hangars and found a young woman preflighting an airplane, a Super Cub 90, that was in one of the open hangars. Well, there were two things in that hangar I was interested in and had to stop and talk to her. ‘This your airplane?’ which is not an opening line heard very often. ‘No; it belongs to my instructor who should be here pretty soon.’
Up rolls a beat-up old red International pickup truck sliding to a dusty stop and a tall Norwegian unfolded himself out of the driver’s seat, with a red hunting hat, blue long-sleeved shirt and Levis with well-worn cowboy boots. ‘You teaching people to fly?’ I asked him. Yes, he has taken on a few students. ‘Could you take on another one?’ ‘I could probably take you on, yes. What are you doing tomorrow? About 6pm or so?’ I was 20 years old, living in Montana, looking like I had just moved there from San Francisco, which I had. That didn’t bother him at all. Thus began an amazing friendship that goes on to this day.
Turns out he was an oil pipeline pilot who wanted to take on a few students as ‘they can get you into situations you could never get yourself in’! Eight students, to be precise. I was one of the lucky eight. On our first hour of instruction, during our ’emergency landing practice’, as we lined up for the field I had selected, rather than saying ‘Ok; you’ve got the field made. Power up and go around.’ we ended up LANDING in that wheat stubble field! I was flabbergasted! I had READ about off-airport landings but never thought about doing it! That was the beginning of him teaching me more than 10 other…or ANY number of other instructors could have taught me. I would frequently go with him on his pipeline patrols, flown at 50-100 feet! My cross-country would be me flying us back to town.
After I soloed and was flying his (working) airplane solo, he said ‘You know, if you want to learn how to fly, you have to get your own airplane.’ I was 20 years old, saving money for college. I knew I would have an airplane ‘someday’ but never thought NOW would be that day. We found two J-3 Cubs for sale and I bought the best of the two, delaying college just a little. Between Larry and my J-3 Cub, that is how I learned to fly. That airplane is still in my hangar. If it wasn’t for him….. Many hours and adventures have been the results of that union. 95% of my hours have been in rag-wing tail-draggers. Oh: and in my RV-4 that I built later! Larry is in his upper 80’s and still flies his PA-12. I could not have learned from anyone better! And I know that! Those instructors are getting increasingly difficult to find.
Did I mention I was one fortunate pilot? Thanks, Larry!
I, too, learned to fly at a small-town airport. The runway was 3000 feet long, with a double-humped camel elevation profile, making the opposite ends invisible from the numbers. The carpet grass runners encroached so far onto the runway that a Cessna 150 landing five feet off centerline would have one wheel on grass. The hangar was 200 feet from the north end of runway, making taxi time way short–too short to warm the engine on a winter day. My instructor was a retired engineer working a Bobcat digging graves at local cemeteries. I soloed at 12 hours. I parked the 150 with 45 hours total time returning from my check ride with my paper private pilot certificate signed off. My PP total cost for EVERYTHING was $946.32, in 1977 dollars.
Now I taxi 40 minutes round-trip at a 3-runway towered general aviation airport just to get to the nearest runway threshold a mile from my hangar. The chief pilot at the local Part 141 flying school estimates that the AVERAGE private pilot gets his certificate logging 95 hours total time. My 40-hours (+ taxi time + non-hood time) instrument rating cost $6000 in 1997 here. One of the flying schools required 40 hours of instructor time just to rent a flying Garmin G1000 panel.
I concur with the author’s advice to get initial training at a small airport with a grey-haired instructor. Too many of the freshout 20-something flight instructors are notorious for building time for an airline career at the expense of abused student pilots. At my small 1977 airport, I met a young son of a medical doctor who’d been inexplicably cycled though three different flight instructors just before solo, mostly likely to delay his solo while milking his dad’s checkbook at the nearby towered airport Cessna Pilot School. The doctor’s son switched to my small, untowered airport, with my grave-digging instructor, and soloed almost immediately.
Fifteen years ago, I visited my 1977 first flight airport. My only “runway” is now a taxiway. Angled off it is a 5000-foot-long, 80-foot-wide concrete runway suitable for business jets. That 1977 runway taught me to land in almost any kind of crosswind PLUS the objective criteria (running out of slipping rudder or aileron travel) for rejecting a crosswind approach too strong for a safe landing.
Great story Kurt,
I was fortunate enough to learn in a J3 at 16, by some great instructors. In later years I got to hang out with one of the Pioneers, Clayton Scott! Spending many hours with him, I got a PHD in aviation history!
Now having flown commercially for 60 years, I am one of oldsters still hanging out at the airport tinkering with my airplane!
Tailwinds to all,
George
I actually sent a student or two to Clayton, back in 87 or 88. Also saw him do his airshow act in a 150 Aerobat at the PAE airshow. Now his photo hangs in the Museum of Flight!
I bounced around from flight school to flight school trying to find the right fit for me. First instructor was a jar head ex Marine. I’m not going to learn anything with someone screaming at me. Nor am I going to put up with it, as I’m the paying customer.
Went to other schools, and I was 15-20 years older than these kids. I wanted someone with skills and knowledge. Not someone right out of a flight school.
Eventually I found a good old school fbo.
I learned to fly in ’65 from a former military flight instructor. Neal taught me to “fly the damn plane”. Solo was with 6.5 hours dual in a Cessna 120 and a Piper PA18-140. I have always felt having an older ex military instructor was the best way to learn. I have had any number of check rides that were unusual to say the least. Like the time doing a departure stall and the instructor had a fit when the plane actually stalled, or another young instructor that I had to show how to spin a 152. No wonder there are so many accidents now a days.
Great words of wisdom Curt, well done! Tell me, did that hurt?
I remember Bill Georgi and our days in Port Angeles fondly.
My ride in Cap’n Mac’s 1927 Travelair half a century ago with my wife and 2-year-old daughter launched me into my flying career. This year, I flew with him again to celebrate. Same airplane. I’ll have a video of that ride on my @OregonOldTimer YouTube channel soon.
Thanks for the memories, Kurt.
That’s a great reply, Eric, thank you for that. I hope you are well, it’s been a long time. You may remember I took my private checkride in your 152, with Kent Olson.