February 2005
Where did I begin? Where did I get my start as an aviation-oriented, crazy-about-everything-having-to-do-with-flying kind of guy?
Like many a romantic movie starring Ryan O’Neal, it all began at a quiet little airport in Lakeland, Fla. called Drane Field in the early part of the 1970s. Drane, now Linder Airport, was an ex-bomber training base from World War II that morphed itself into a General Aviation field.
I was no stranger to the airport. I had been riding my bicycle the six mile route from my house to the parking lot at the airport for a couple of years already. Sometimes my older sister or brother would drive me, but since I was about 14 the airport was where I wanted to go when I had some spare time.
To say that a different universe existed back then compared to now is a huge understatement. I spent many days at the airport randomly sitting in airplanes, playing with the controls and bumming rides when people went flying.
There is a technique to bumming a ride. First, you have to be around when they are getting the airplane, doing their preflight. Help them untie the airplane. Ask them where they are going. Look young, eager and hopeful. About 90 percent of the time they fly off without you. Sometimes they take you along.
In our current environment I’m pretty sure that this kind of technique is impossible, but it has been so long since I’ve tried it that I may be wrong. If any of you have had success bumming rides at your local airport, let me know. I’d like to start doing it again but want to avoid being arrested by Homeland Security.
An Experienced Character
As a high school senior and a lineboy at Lakeland Flying Service, I had been around flying long enough to get my private and learn how to drain the avgas fuel hose into my Suzuki’s tank. I knew how to drape the hose from the Avgas truck over my shoulder when I fueled high-wing airplanes. I knew how to mix Prist® in with Jet-A when topping off Lears and had already learned the hard way that you should put a little bit of fuel in one side and then the other when you are servicing them. I crushed an aluminum ladder under a tiptank learning that one.
I had been taught by Burr Amick, our elderly line crew chief and a veteran of the 1930s labor union wars, how to roll my own cigarettes using Zig-Zag papers and pipe tobacco. Fred the mechanic had taught me how to work as a shop assistant and Jesse Hinson, one of the flight instructors working at the flight school, had introduced me to spins and flying through weather.
I had already been to Wichita twice to pick up new airplanes and knew how to follow a course line on a sectional chart with my thumb while reading water towers to get a fix on my position. I was an 18-year-old cigarette-smoking, coffee-drinking, hard-flying, hard-playing man of the world who thought he knew everything, but didn’t really know much.
My Favorite Year
Most people can look back on the life they have had so far and pick out a few periods that made a huge difference. Pearl Harbor changed the lives of millions of people. The day President Kennedy was shot changed others and entire years, like 1968, forever changed entire countries and generations.
My changeover point was 1973. That was the year that I fell totally head over heels in love with flying. The lucky people inhabiting this planet arrive at a feeling that they belong somewhere or to something. Unfortunate souls end up belonging to religious cults and spend their time awaiting the mother ship or a comet. Others decide that nothing in the world very much makes a difference or is exciting. These folks go on either to a lifetime of taking drugs or a lifespan of boredom. I was one of the lucky people.
My then-girlfriend, now wife of almost 30years, was the other love of my life back then but she was a year older than me and had already gone off to FSU. Except for the occasional weekend or holiday break, I was on my own and because I didn’t have to waste a lot of time on the dating scene, I had an unlimited amount of energy to spend on aviation.
What Love Is
Lord Dewar once said “love is an ocean of emotions entirely surrounded by expenses.” That was true in my case, although I had an enormous advantage on others that were interested in flying because I got to spend all of my free time and very little money with airplanes, hangars and runways that year.
The expenses of taking lessons to get my private rating were in the past. I had earned and spent that money while I was a bellboy at a local motel. Now my flying expenses were just about nil. I could save to go to college, and save for those infrequent rendezvous with my girlfriend. A person’s life has turning points and hinges.
My senior year of high school was one of those hinges. Should I enlist in the army and fly helicopters as a Warrant Officer? That would get me in the air professionally the quickest, but there was still a little thing called Vietnam going on and the helicopter pilots fortunate enough to return were walking with limps garnered from being shot in the rump. No, I wasn’t grown up enough to do that.
College was the next step but I was torn three ways. My girlfriend was a big draw to FSU; Embry-Riddle was beckoning with the siren call of getting a flying degree of some sort. The third part of the triangle was that even though I loved my girlfriend and flying, I wasn’t all that keen on getting a flying degree.
My love of books, history and storytelling would later lead me to a liberal arts degree—far away from an aviation diploma. Teenagers are a jumble of emotions, conflicting thoughts, hormonal firestorms and a body that is completely out of their control. Things break out, get bigger, grow smaller and voices go from choir boy to Beastie Boy in a matter of months.
The airport in Lakeland with its conflicting FBOs; Roberts Flying Service and Lakeland Flying Service, was my anchor, my center of the universe and my castle keep. I was more comfortable sitting on a concrete picnic table on the flight line than I would have been in the coziest chair at home. The airport was my home.
My parents were kindly but distracted and indifferent. The people I dealt with at my lineboy job were anything but. Each had a definite point of view and strongly tried to influence my thinking. The FBO was rife with philanderers, drunks, born-agains and zoned out zim-dweebies. If there ever was a place to pick and choose between life choices, this was it.
It wasn’t just the fact that a cross section of a flawed society existed in its own little mini-universe at Lakeland, it was that I belonged there. My presence wasn’t mandated by law like it was at school. It wasn’t mandated by filial responsibility like at home with my parents and my constant attendance wasn’t ordained by a vengeful god, like at church.
I was at the airport because I belonged there. I mean this in the cosmic sense. There was a force that drew me there, kept me there and encouraged me to return every time I left. The sense of belonging wasn’t there because I was important to the operation of either the FBO or the airport.
I was the most unimportant person there. I was the guy they called on to unstop toilets, clean barf out of the trainers and walk the boss’s dog when it needed to poop. In the food chain of airport life, I was plankton. This experience of being the lowest of the low is something I’ve come to think that everybody should go through. The military has a shorter version of it. They call it boot camp.
Because of this extended tour of duty as a go-fer and serf, I could later appreciate the effort expended by ground crews on the airline when I asked to have my lavs dumped during a blizzard or a tire changed in hundred-degree heat. I had the authority to demand these things because I had been there and done that.
The flying we lineboys did was of the basest variety. An hour here in a Cessna 150 or Cherokee 140 either rented at the company discount or purloined using the “remove the Hobbs fuse and refuel on the sly” method.
The first formation flying I did was with two other line boys after hours. We had the hubris of youth. No experience and not much skill, but a sure-footed sense that we were immortal and lucky. It was the evenings at the airport that I loved the most. During the waning moments of the day I was the only person there. I was the office person, the line crew and by default, management. Just me and a ramp full of amazing airplanes.
Grabbing the last cup of coffee of a seven-cup day, I would walk out into the cooling air and sit on a wheel beneath the Lodestar. A cigarette dangling out of my lips, I would look out on my domain and be at peace.
The past was a jumble of growth, the mind-numbing experience that a public school education brings, the benign concern of parents who were tired of parenting and a sense of trying to move but not budging at all.
My future was a huge gaping maw. People were still dying in a strange far away war. People that I knew were dying from drugs or mistakes made with eight cylinder cars. I didn’t see death in my future but I was young and wasn’t supposed to sense the chilling hand of time and physical erosion yet.
It was the present that mattered to me then. The smell of the air on the ramp after a short-lived heavy rain – an oily odor that combined the scent of aircraft with the ozone-tinged atmosphere of a passing storm. I reveled in the company of machinery that I was just then beginning to understand. I knew nothing of coupled approaches, IFR flight, air conditioning packs, hydraulics, Category II approaches, or leading edge devices, but I knew from those moments on the ramp that they were going to be something I was going to know all about and soon.
At the end of many church services, the minister says, “May the peace of God that passes all understanding be with and abide with you always.” My ramp days as a pimpled faced neophyte smartass and semi-professional pilot were exactly like that.
Itching from a 13-hour day working in the heat, smelling like I had worked 13 hours in it and suffering from a mental buzz brought on by smoking Camels at too young an age, I had that calm feeling that everything was going to be fine.
I still feel that way. After 30-plus years flying everything from Champs to 777s, I feel most contented at the airport on the ramp. Just to be in the company of these airplanes gives me a peace that I can’t understand or explain. It is simply where I belong.
Kevin Garrison’s aviation career began at age 15 as a lineboy in Lakeland, Fla. He came up through General Aviation and is currently a senior 767 captain. When not frightening passengers, Kevin plays tennis and lives on a horse farm in Kentucky, where he writes unsold humor projects and believes professional wrestling is real and all else is bogus.
