10/11/07

Aviation (1959-1997)

Flying has been a life-long passion. My flying career of four thousand hours in command covered a remarkable epoch in aviation. From a 90 horsepower Luscombe 8-A taildragger to my own 700 horsepower turbo-charged Piper Navajo Chieftain executive twin. From the very first primitive instrument landing system using the four-beam, A-N (dot-dash, dash-dot) on "non-directional beacon" low frequency signal, through DME, VOR, ILS and finally GPS approach-certificated, 3-dimensional Global Positioning System using up to 24 satellites. I have a commercial pilot license with instrument, multi-engine, and seaplane ratings, and have logged four thousand hours in command, some jet time, with landings in most major airports in the USA and Canada. I survived two crash landings and one catastrophic icing, the closest call, and one engine-out landing. Next to music, flying has been the greatest source of pleasure in my life.

My first flight occurred when I was about six or seven. One September day a barnstormer dropped leaflets advertising flights over Brüsau, the village where I spent summers with my Grandfather Siegfried Jellenik, the district physician. As grandfather’s birthday present , his chauffeur Johann Mlejnek took me to a freshly mowed corn field on a plateau overlooking town, and I was strapped into the front cockpit of a WW-1 biplane, with a parachute cushion raising me to where I could see out. Somewhat apprehensive at first, I returned exhilarated and addicted for life. My second flight happened at about age nine when my father took me to the original Vienna airport at Aspern for a "Rundflug" over greater Vienna in a six-seat Junkers "airliner" with cabin windows of isinglass (natural mica). I remember them vibrating violently. My third flight was in a yellow Piper cub, which I earned by shoveling snow at Flushing Airport on Long Island during our first winter in America, the winter of 39-40. Flushing airport was then at the edge of Flushing Meadows where the World’s Fair was held in 1941, and where LaGuardia Airport was built. When I landed there more recently the field was surrounded by high-rise apartment houses and it was finally closed because of being too close to LaGuardia. It was an accident waiting to happen.

After earning my PhD in 1954 I started working at MIT Lincoln Laboratory and felt that I could finally afford to fly. Three colleagues and I bought a Luscombe 8A taildragger, and three days a week at 6am, I rode my Triumph Tiger-110 motorcycle to Beverly Airport for a flying lesson before work. I had two instructors: John McNemarra and Paul Currier, both WW-2 pilots with a no-nonsense attitude and a strong belief in emergency procedure training. They had me under the hood (wearing blue goggles under a amber cockpit screen) much of the time recovering from unusual attitudes including flat spins (graveyard spirals), with all instruments covered up except "needle, ball and airspeed". Their exceptional emphasis on emergency training saved my life during an encounter with catastrophic icing not much later. . On my first flight John McNemarra exclaimed "Jeez, this plane flies sideways!" Turns out our Luscombe was a bargain because it had been ground-looped (struck a wingtip on landing) and its fuselage frame was bent. It just took a slight rudder pressure to fly straight and we got used to it.

After earning my private pilot license on 7 Sep 1960 I started traveling to more airports and soon got tired of having no electric system , no lights and no radio. It was still possible then to circle and wait for a green light from the tower, but those days were coming to an end. I met Ken Ford who had a small club at Bedford, and we merged to form a larger club we called "Associated Pilots". I took over maintenance, and my first task was to buy a new plane. I found an inexpensive, well equipped Cessna 170 (with so-called "cross-wind gear", actually casters that made you go where the wind took you. It was outlawed shortly after its introduction) at MacArthur field on Long Island and flew it home around dusk on the 25^th of September 1960, a gray day. The battery died before I got to Bedford, a radio-controlled field, and I landed at Marlboro, a very short uncontrolled grass field with tall trees at both ends. I found the entire engine compartment drenched with oil. Cracked crankcase?? No wonder it was a bargain. I decided to do the short hop to Bedford next morning and had them charge the battery and top off the oil at Marlboro.

Elizabeth picked me up and took me back to Marlboro next morning, with Margaret, then three years old. The engine didn’t seem to produce full power on take-off and I was sure I wouldn’t clear the trees. I aborted thirty feet above ground and did a sideslip-landing with crossed controls, as I had been taught. I will never know whether this was a mistake, but it was preferable to crashing into trees fifty feet up. The plane burst into flames so abruptly that I was sure the oil-soaked cowl had been on fire before the landing. Fortunately there wasn’t much fuel in the wing-tanks, but there was enough to burn essentially everything but the engine. Aluminum burns with a bright flame, and empty tanks explode with a bang. Elizabeth, with Margaret in her arms, watched the crash and was sure I had burned with the plane. But fortunately the plane crashed with its left door down, and I had escaped in time. Only when she saw me running from the fire did Elizabeth realize I had survived. It was a traumatic experience. For years thereafter she closed her eyes during every take-off. Every flight was an act of courage for her, and I am grateful she flew with me at all.

On the 12 of July 1961 I passed the flight test and earned my seaplane rating in Methuen on the Merrimack River, after a dozen or so lessons in a Piper cub on floats. I also had some time in a Lake Amphibian at Beverly with several landings (waterings?) on the ocean and on various lakes.

On the 13^th of July 1962, having logged 195 hours including several hours of instrument instruction with Frank Comerford in actual IFR (including flights with an ice-covered windshield) and 20 hours in a Link simulator, plus several hours with Captain Bill Ferguson, a very demanding army flight instructor who had joined our club, I passed the phase three instrument flight test with FAA inspector Vaughn at Laconia. I remember making an ILS approach at Portland after Vaughn cut my engine over the airport just as I broke out of overcast into the setting sun. Having the required 200 hours, I immediately started learning all the regulations and maneuvers required for the commercial license: IFR,, VOR, NDB and vectored approaches, short-field, cross-wind and side-slip landings, pylons, chandelles, lazy eights, steep turns, stalls at all attitudes, spirals, landings, holding pattern entry and exit, recovery from unusual attitudes with and without hood, and precision radar "talk-down" approaches under the hood all the way to touch-down with Captain Ferguson at Logan. Talk-down approaches were required only for military pilots, but Ferguson felt that all pilots should know how. "Some day you may be out of gas in zero-zero weather" . Logan had the only precision radar in the area, and when the Logan tower approach controller said he was too busy for a precision radar approach, Ferguson barked "I am Captain Ferguson,, U S Army, and I insist on my right for a talk-down under FAR so-and-so, and we will hold until you have time to give us three talk-downs. This scenario will amuse any current pilots who have flown into Logan.

On the ninth of May 1963 I passed the commercial flight test, again with inspector Vaughn at Laconia. He liked pilots who take their flying seriously. "Too many squirrels will kill aviation!" He used to say. Squirrel is the nickname FAA controllers call Sunday pilots, or "doctors in Bonanzas they don’t know how to fly." I didn’t really have plans to fly passengers for pay, but I felt that I owed it to myself and my family to maintain a professional level of competence.

My second accident happened on the 26^th of January 1963, while I was flying right seat in a Cessna 172 as safety pilot for another club member, with my right foot in a cast due to a broken ankle. A ladder had slipped out from under me on New Year’s eve as I was dismantling the old staircase in the dining room. On a practice instrument approach into Worcester the engine quit and my friend made an emergency landing on the grounds of the Worcester mental hospital. The landing was perfect, up a gentle incline, but we rolled into a rock and the nosewheel collapsed. Reporters were there even before Elizabeth picked me up, and our pictures were all over the papers and the evening news. Everybody thought I had broken my ankle in the accident. The FAA found two gallons of ice in the wing tanks and slush in the fuel lines. It turns out that frost heaves had broken the vent pipe of an underground fuel tank at Bedford allowing water to leak into the tank. Ours was the first plane to be fueled that morning and got a large dose of water. The water froze in the wing tanks. But the fuel anti-freeze (methyl alcohol) in the tanks made the water freeze into a slush with the consistency of sherbet. The sherbet got sucked into the fuel pump and gradually clogged the carburetor in the twenty minutes it took us to reach Worcester before it stopped the engine. It is interesting that on the same day a four-engine Constellation out to sea from Pease Air Force Base had all four engines stop for exactly the same reason. They too managed an emergency landing. "Good training!" Ferguson said later. Pilots: beware freeze-thaw-freeze-thaw weather.

My third incident was the closest call, although it didn’t end in an accident, miraculously. It happened on Saturday the third of November 1962. I had given a colloquium lecture at Rochester University and was returning the morning after in our very primitively equipped Cessna 172. It had a Narco Superhomer whistle-stop-tuned nav-com radio, an ADF (automatic direction finder, now called NDB for non-directional beacon receiver), an electric turn-and-bank indicator, an unheated pitot tube airspeed indicator, and a vacuum-driven directional gyro which got its vacuum from an external venturi tube. There was no engine-driven vacuum pump. I had a brand new instrument rating and had filed an instrument flight plan. It was solid IMC (instrument meteorological conditions).

As I approached Albany I was picking up some rime ice at 11,000 feet and asked ATC for a lower altitude, hoping to get below the freezing level. That was a big mistake, a death trap known to all experienced New England Pilots, as Frank Comerford later explained. ATC obliged. "You are cleared to descend to five thousand at Colrain intersection." Colrain is just at the crest of the Berkshire mountains, and I was descending a cold airplane into a headwind saturated with supercooled rain as the air rose up the Berkshire slope and expanded adiabatically. Every raindrop froze instantly as it hit the airplane. It is a perfect scenario for catastrophic icing, the sort of thing that you read about in textbooks and that only happens to other people. If you are a pilot you may not want to read on, because what follows will give you nightmares. On the other hand, it may save your life. Don’t fool with mother nature!

Shortly after beginning my descent I started picking up ice at a catastrophic rate. The windshield and leading edges were covered immediately, and even full power didn’t maintain altitude. Looking out of the side window I saw the wheels rotating slowly as ice collected in front and they grew larger and larger until they were the size of truck tires and still growing. The propeller started shaking so violently that I feared it would break the engine mounts off the fuselage. The antennas whipped furiously. The engine started sputtering as it gasped for air, but I could only apply carburetor heat intermittently. I needed all the power I could get and was still losing altitude. The directional gyro lost its vacuum as the venturi iced up, and the airspeed indicator stopped indicating because the pitot tube iced up. With only a magnetic compass I couldn’t hold a very true course. I was flying at a very steep angle of attack and on the verge of stalling, losing altitude more and more rapidly . The rate-of-climb indicator had stopped working because the static vent was iced up. At this point I had nothing but a magnetic compass and an electric turn-and-bank indicator. To add to my troubles, I was running out of fuel, and I had no idea of my position. I called flight service, but they didn’t hear me. I think my com antenna had broken off. A United Airlines pilot heard me, and offered to relay my messages. Thanks for the friendly air of United! I asked for df (direction finder) steer, hoping my transmission signal was strong enough.. Flight service got a triangulation from the towers at Bedford, Worcester and Lawrence, and reported that I was right on course. That was good news, because the airway followed route two along a notch, which avoided Mount Wachusetts. What was my altitude? Approaching two thousand. Was I aware of terrain exceeding my altitude (notably Mount Wachusetts). Yes, but there was nothing I could do about it. Did I have ground contact? None whatever. Keep talking. At this point I was straining to see trees out of my side windows, hoping for enough ceiling to avoid impact at the last second. I was certain that I would die any moment. But I never panicked and I kept flying the airplane. I was below the freezing level at this point, and I felt that things could only get better.

Suddenly, for two seconds, I saw a clearing out of my left window, and there was route two. It was pouring rain, and all the cars had their headlights on. I had passed Mount Wachusetts! I started a slow left turn as steeply as I dared hoping to return to the clearing and land on route two, and then I saw an airport. I said to flight service "I have ground contact over Orange and will land." Flight service thought I said Lawrence, and sent the state police to Lawrence, as I found out later. I descended and turned as steeply as I dared, on the verge of stalling at full power. As I rolled out, a shower of ice broke off my wheels and hit the underside of my wings making a thundering noise.

As I stopped in front of the FBO a bunch of parachutists, grounded by the surprise storm, came out and as I opened my left door, the first words I heard were "Jesus! I didn’t think a Cessna can fly with that much ice!" "Don’t try! It can’t!" I replied. "Only down-hill." We measured four inches on the leading edges, and two over the fuel filler caps. Elizabeth picked me up and took me back next morning to retrieve the plane. I got white knuckles as I retraced my route and saw just how close I had flown to "terrain exceeding my altitude" My survival was truly a miracle.

When I visited Hanscom Tower to thank them for the direction steer and tell them my story, the controller who had done it smiled. Turns out that he had "flown the hump"many times in China during WW-2, in a DC-3 (gooney-bird). and had a very similar experience. He was ready to bail out, when he saw a hole in the clouds above a clearing where the sun had heated the ground just enough to produce a small thermal. But how he found the hole was not explainable by meteorological science. "My number just wasn’t up that day", he said. And neither was Yours. Shake!" .

On a subsequent occasion years later, returning from Hibbing, Minnesota in our H-35 Bonanza, I encountered the same coastal storm, but I had learned my lesson. When the center controller cleared me to descent after Colrain, I refused. Finally he said "Sir, you are going to have to descend to land at Hanscom!" I said "I will make a circling descent at the Bedford beacon" He agreed. And before descending I extended my landing gear and twenty degrees of flaps, and it was a good thing. Because I picked up enough ice in my descent to jam the landing gear doors. I couldn’t have extended my gear had I not done so at altitude. Old Frank Comerford’s advice: "When picking up ice, never descend. CLIMB until you get to your destination!" Pilots, take note.

In about 1978, having reduced my MIT time to 80 percent to buy consulting rights, I resigned from Associated Pilots, after adding a Cessna 210 and a Mooney 201 to our fleet. I remember that the factory pilot refused to deliver our new Mooney to Marlboro because he considered it too short. They don’t have many trees around Texas airports. I joined Bill Krivsky in co-owning his six-seat A-36 Bonanza, which we moved from Norwood to Bedford. It was a step up. The next step came in 1980. My brother Eric and I had founded PEPI (Piezo-Electric Products Inc). We were courting an investor who was appalled at learning that Eric and I were flying around in a single engine airplane, and I welcomed the excuse to move up to a twin. My family had outgrown the max gross weight of the A-36, and not having an airplane big enough for my family was an unacceptable level of poverty. I deserved better!

I earned my multi-engine rating in Augusta, Maine on the 31^st of January 1981, after very thorough engine-out training at Bedford with Harold Barnes in the very severe winter of 80-81, using a Beech Queen-Air that didn’t like to start in cold weather, and didn’t like to fly on one engine. I remember cold mornings kneeling on the ice under its cowl, nursing a propane engine-heater, with Harold Barnes then in his seventies, in the right seat.

After trips in several leased twins I bought a 1978 Piper Navajo Chieftain, tail number N27674. It is a cabin-class twin with two turbo-charged six cylinder 350 horsepower Lycoming engines, and it came equipped with two alternative interiors: an 8-seat (2 crew + 6 "club" seats) executive interior with a partitioned bathroom and galley, and a more spartan ten-seat airliner configuration. It was exceptionally well-equipped with oxygen masks, air conditioning, ground ventilation fans, eyeball vents, individual reading lights, folding tables, carpeting, complete de-icing equipment (propeller heat, windshield heat, and leading edge pneumatic boots, weather radar, dual navigation and communication radios (ILS, VOR, NDB and DME), dual transponders, dual strobe beacons, and optional cockpit and cargo doors (double-opening doors to accommodate a stretcher or coffin, nicknamed "coffin door" by Navajo pilots). Later I added every new avionic unit available, until my Navajo had more avionics than most airliners. Flight director coupled to three-axis autopilot, radar altimeter, GEM engine monitor for all twelve cylinders, heavy duty Cleveland disk brakes, Loran-C navigator, and finally an approach-certificated GPS (Global Positioning System) with a NorthStar Smartcom (radio that automatically tunes in local stations), with Jeppesen software renewed every 20 days.

I bought my Navajo from Ken Robinson, the FBO at Beverly airport West ramp and joined his part 135 charter operation on a lease-back agreement under which I would fly. This got me very favorable insurance rates because Ken had a flawless record, as well as some commercial time-in-command. I had a contract with Digital Equipment for a nightly cargo run. At the end of every day the ground crew would remove all seats and partitions and install a canvass cargo liner. Then I or another pilot would fly to Trenton and pick up a thousand pounds of computer peripherals to be repaired from the New York and Philadelphia area. A Digital van met us at Beverly and took the equipment to be repaired to their shop in Maynard. Next evening I would fly it back to Trenton and pick up a new load. This saved Digital the expense of operating a shop in New York. The $550 I got for each round trip was profitable enough to pay off the mortgage on my plane, until the famous controller strike in 1981, when hour-long holds over New York and Boston killed all profits, and I terminated the contract under my bail-out clause. Digital decided it would cost them less to hire a truck with two drivers. They found out that the rough truck ride did so much damage to the equipment that it cost them more. Our daytime passenger customers included the Hood Dairy Company, whose executives could visit several dairy farms in the north country and be home for dinner, a Boston leather broker who visited tanneries in Vermont and Canada, a chemical engineer from A.D.Little Inc. who worked for several Maine paper companies, a Boston patent law firm with customers in Burlington and Lebanon, and a number of medical missions including organ transplant teams carrying an organ packed in ice in a Igloo cooler, and kids from the back country who needed to go to Mass General Hospital for emergency surgery. We once saved the eye of a machinist with a steel splinter.

I had 160 hours of dual time with Steve Flint before I felt comfortable enough in the Navajo to deal with emergencies. I remember my first solo flight in it in 1982. As fate would have it, the flight was to IAD, Dulles International a very high work-load for a single pilot, even an experienced one. It was my baptism of fire . I did a perfect job, and I have made dozens of more landings at Dulles since. And dozens at Washington National, where I once had a gyro failure during an IFR departure.

I also had special permission to land at military airports, having several Army and Navy contracts. For example, Fort Belvoir Virginia, Army Engineer Corps headquarters, and Lakehurst, New Jersey, Navy carrier catapult test and training center with the world’s largest hangar, where the Hindenburg Zeppelin burned on 6 May 1937.

Single-engine landing

My first and only one occurred about then, a lesson to all pilots. Never trust an airplane just out of the shop. During an annual inspection the Beverly mechanics found that the right engine needed a major overhaul and sent it to Mattituck on the tip of Long Island, meanwhile closing up the left engine temporarily. When a replacement right engine came back they installed it and had the chief mechanic sign it off, but forgot that nobody had signed off the left engine a week earlier. It turns out that the compression nut on the oil line to the filter had never been tightened. We got as far as Ports mouth when Steve Flint in the right seat observed "no oil pressure". Rather than burn out an engine, I ordered the left engine shut down, feathered the left t prop, did all the proper engine-out emergency procedures, declared an emergency, and made a beautiful single-engine approach and landing at Beverly. Steve was a little nervous, but my FSI instructors would have been proud. I found out that you can’t taxi a Navajo on a single engine. It goes in circles. We had to call for the tug.

I got increasingly too busy to fly missions, and I didn’t like the way young pilots building time treated my plane. I had paid off my mortgage. The last straw came when one young pilot kept shutting down the left engine without letting the turbocharger cool down, carbonizing the oil seals and burning out the turbo-charger at a cost of about $7,000. Besides, I wanted to move my plane from Beverly to Bedford, where I couldn’t operate night charter flights due to a noise curfew. So I ended my partnership with Ken Robinson, and my Navajo became my own personal company/family plane. I moved it and my corporate headquarters to Jet Aviation Terminal at Bedford. I had created paradise on earth!! How many people manage to have a luxurious office and conference room overlooking an airport and their own private hangar, and within twenty minute’s drive of their country estate? I had arrived. My friend Tom Mitchell, chief mechanic at Beverly had become chief mechanic of Jet Aviation at Bedrord, and later became Vice President for the Swiss company.

I finally retired form MIT in 1982 after two sabbatical years in industry. My colleagues gave me a retirement party, and I remember using a slide taken at low altitude from the Navajo cockpit showing the Statue of Liberty, with Newark Airport and our Metuchen plant in the background. I recalled that I had first seen the statue as a 14 year old immigrant in 1939, and not in my fondest dreams would I have expected to see it from my own airplane. I was indeed grateful for what our country had enabled me to accomplish.

From 1982 to 1995 I flew 150 to 200 hours a year, almost all of them deductible business flights. Piezo Electric Products Inc (PEPI) had a laboratory in Cambridge on Mass Ave opposite MIT, and a production plant in Metuchen NJ, and I flew almost weekly to Linden Airport usually with engineers and researchers. In 1992 Magneplane International got a 2.8 million dollar contract with DOE, DOT, and Army Engineers, which involved eleven engineering teams and government labs, and I flew often to Lakeland FL, Chicago, Wichita, Denver, Colorado Springs, Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Los Alamos, (I consulted for Sandia and Los Alamos), Huntsville, Cleveland, Toronto, Quebec, Mountain View, Newport News, Montpelier, and Islip NY, and Kansas City to visit Margaret. My pilot log shows many more destinations.

In about 1990 I was returning from Florida with Elizabeth and David Carrier in the Nvajo during the famous winter when southern Tennesee had over a foot of snow, followed by an influx of tropical air from the Gulf of Mexico, while there was still snow on the ground. I made an ILS approach to runway 5L at Maghee-Tyson airport in Knoxville (TYS). At about a hundred feet AGL I entered a ground fog layer so thick that I couldn’t see the approach lights. But since I had already seen them earlier I was legal and I stayed on instruments and landed, using my radar altimeter. I called tower, and they responded with "report runway in sight". I replied "I have landed". Tower seemed convinced they had misunderstood and repeated "report runway in sight" I repeated that I had landed. Next cam: "turn on your strobes" I said "they have been on all the time". Expression of disbelief, followed by "hold in position and wait for ground vehicle to guide you to the ramp". At this point I was afraid the driver would run into us, but he didn’t.

Every spring and fall from 82 to 97 I flew to Lakeland, Florida for simulator training at the Flight Safety International training center next to the Piper plant where my Navajo had been built. Most professional pilots go to FSI twice a year, and I met Navajo pilots from all over the world, from the tropics to the arctic, including a crew from Austria. Once I met Christopher Reeve there. He also flew a Navajo. We went swimming before breakfast every morning. I didn’t know how famous he was, until the instructors told me "he is superman!". I just didn’t watch TV much. Chris was amused. "New experience". Coincidentally I had a partner in Lakeland, David Carrier, with whom I had started the Paramag Corporation to develop High Gradient Magnetic Separation. We had a laboratory in Lakeland, and I was able to combine my flight training with my business. After our children left home, Elizabeth accompanied me on these trips, and attended an Elderhostel while I did my business. We both stopped at some interesting place enroute to and from Florida. Kill Devil Hill, Charleston, New Bern, Myrtle Beach, St Augustine, Daytona Beach, St Marys, etc. See my pilot log for more.

On our return from Europe in July 1997 I developed shingles in my right eye and ten days later woke up with my left side paralyzed. A post-herpatic stroke. I spent a week at Emerson Hospital and four weeks at South-Health rehab center in Woburn. My neurologist Dr Russel Butler predicted life in a wheelchair, then on crutches, then with a cane, and then with a brace. But to his surprise I regained 90 percent of my abilities due to shear determination.. He said he described me to his students at Tufts as an example of willpower. But I was left with fuzzy peripheral vision, although my foveal vision is still 20-25. But flying was not an option. I sold my Navajo in 1998 to Valet Air Service in Burlington VT. Just when I had the time and money to pursue my love for music and flying, fate deprived me of both. Flying is over, although I have recently resumed practicing the piano and organ, but at a pitiful level.

I have launched four young people on aviation careers.

David Bickmore, airline pilot, is the son of John Bickmore, division head at Xerox in Rochester. SOne night, after dinner at the Bickfords, they drove me to the airport, and their son, age about 8, was excited when I let him sit in the cockpit of my Bonanza and explained the instruments and controls. Both David and his father took flying lessons, and David became an airline pilot.

Osa Fitch, my graduate student, was an aviation enthusiast even before I took him on trips in my Bonanza and Navajo. He joined the Navy and wound up as instructor and helicopter test pilot at Patuxent River. Ultimately he graduated from the Naval Academy in San Diego. The Fitch family plans to retire in New Hampshire.

Marc Ye is the son of Alvie Ye, a friend and fellow recorder-player of Elizabeth’s. All the Ye children were classmates of our daughters. Marc was at lose ends, working s a salesman for Bose, a profession he neither enjoyed nor was good at. I took him on trips in my Navajo. He joined Executive Flyers, earned his commercial, instructor’s and airline pilot’s ratings, and ended up as captain for Northwest Airlines, flying B-747s across the Pacific and to Alaska and Canada.

John Williams and his wife Ann came from England, and John finished his electrical engineering education at MIT. We hired him to design high field solenoid magnets for the Francis Bitter National Magnet Lab, and I took him on business trips in our Bonanza and later our Mooney and Navajo. His father was a WW-2 aviator in the RAF, and he was a pre-disposed aviation enthusiast. Eventually he bought his own plane and moved to Windsock Village, an aviation community in New Hampshire.

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