2008 April 18
2010 March 26

A few stream-of-consciousness thoughts on A. Bailey Duncan's (my dad) career as a pilot.

Dad wanted to be a pilot from his childhood.  He would sit in the bathtub with a broomstick and play like he was flying it.  One of his earliest hobbies was building and free-flying model airplanes.  He worked at this until he got it right and was, when I knew him, a master of the art.

He graduated from high school in 1943 and went straight to the Army Air Force at age 17 (they had 11 grades back then).  This was near the end of WW II, but at 6'2" dad was too tall to be eligible for pilot's training.  In the Army, he was known as a cigar smoking, rough talking, poker player (hard for us to imagine) and was sent around various bases in the middle of the country:  Pratt, Kansas; Alamogordo, NM; Amarillo Field.  At first he was slated for radio school, but the school was closed and he ended up being trained as a B-29 mechanic.  (Don't hold me to that number, might have been B-17.)  He was a Crew Chief at one point and was involved in some test flights, at least one of which experienced an emergency, an engine fire.  When he told that story he would always quote the pilot on the intercom, "Anybody got any hot dogs?"

He made, and lost one stripe several times, alternating between private and private first class.

He was at Alamogordo when the first A-Bomb, the Trinity test, was conducted just a few miles away.

Sometime between 1943 and 1945 a couple of pivotal and possibly related things happened:

- Somebody dad knew or knew of committed suicide by walking into a rotating airplane propeller.
- Dad was making a similar plan for himself when he met Jesus in the middle of the night on a bus somewhere near the New Mexico border.

We know these things because he preached about them in his sermons all the time, especially the second.

Mom may have known dad before he was saved, but I bet they weren't engaged before he was saved.

Mom and dad were engaged in 1945 and married in 1949 (October 30).

In 1945 mom would have been just barely in college in Canyon.  Dad would have been home on leave, in a uniform, when they met.

To hear dad tell it, mom knew about the cigars and hated them.  After he was saved there were no more cigars, no more rough talk, and no more poker, at least not for real money.  (But, dad being random, you can see how he could succeed at poker.  Nobody in the game, including he himself, would have known what in the devil he was doing!)

At some point after his chemistry degree from Canyon (which had been delayed by the war) he decided to go into the ministry.  He went straight to seminary from the wedding, basically.  They first lived in Dallas and within a year or so had that first student appointment at Marysville - spring 1950 we think.  He had been a fairly poor chemistry student, but did well in other subjects like history, and in seminary.

So with all that going on, it doesn't seem like there would have been time or money for flying lessons.

It is believed that sometime after he got out of the service but probably before getting married his mother paid for him to learn to fly privately.  I don't know much about this except that he is lucky to have lived to middle age.  He had a devil-may-care attitude and did many unsafe stunts including buzzing farmers, flying in inclement weather, and flying under bridges.

There was a story about leaving a strip of fabric from an airplane's tale on a windmill.  I don't know if that was a firsthand story about dad or just one of those apocryphal stories about someone else.

There was a story about not having his seat belt on tight enough while flying through a thunderstorm, and not being able to let go long enough to do anything about it.

I think it was for flying under a bridge that he was grounded for a year by the FAA.  It could have been during this year of being grounded that mom and dad were married.

I only learned any of this after dad died.  One day I asked mom, "If you hated flying so much, why did you marry dad?"  She told me that he was grounded for a long time so flying was out of the picture for him at the time.  I put two and two together to come up with the prior story.

About ten years later, I was a small child, like three or four.  Although I was born in Paris while mom and dad lived in nearby Roxton, and we lived in Irving and other places soon thereafter, my first memories are from Frisco  (1959ish), when it was a town of 3000.  By then dad had a little money and some connections and was flying again.  There are a few pictures of dad and mom and I at Park Cities Airport from that period.  Park Cities was on the site of what is now the Galleria in Dallas.  At that time it was out in the country on the way from tiny Frisco to growing suburban Dallas.  It seems like it was about that much further down to the suburbs where Plymouth Park Methodist church was.  Dad founded that church when I was a baby.



You can google around and find information about such airports, now gone, and the churches, some still there.

Dad had friends who were pilots.  One friend at Frisco was a kid younger than dad who himself got grounded for an extended period for attempting a takeoff from a country road and running over a farm truck, killing the farmer and his wife.

I also remember a power blackout one day when we lived in Frisco.  A crop duster had hit the power lines, taking them out.  We drove out and looked at the wreck.  The lights were off for several hours.

I also remember hearing sonic booms in Frisco.  This is before they were made illegal over land.

I also remember the day seagulls flew over Frisco though we were hundreds of miles from the Gulf of Mexico.  The eye of hurricane Carla had passed over us, the storm well down into "tropical depression" category by the time it got to us.  My wife has a much bigger story about Carla.

Dad told the story about his dad who had said to him, "Son, you will live to see men fly at 300 miles per hour!"  Not only did he live to see that, his dad lived to see it himself.  In fact, his dad lived to see men fly in space, at 17,500 miles per hour!

We moved to Henrietta the year before I went into first grade (1962 - 1966).  Dad flew with two outfits in Wichita Falls at Kickapoo Airport.  One was run by Dalton Watts (who I always confused with Isaac Watts, the hymn writer, Andre Watts, the pianist, and James Watt, inventor of the steam engine).  Dalton rented Mooney's, a low wing airplane with high performance.  I think they could cruise up around 160 - 180 knots indicated airspeed.  The other guy rented Cessnas, high wingers that were slower and less expensive.  I don't recall his name.

For six months Watts leased a Citaborea ("aerobatic" spelled backwards) an aerobatic-rated high wing tandem (front and back seating) made by the Champion company (or was it Aeronca, or had they merged?) for his advance customers.  Dad brought me a Dramamine at school one afternoon in third grade and after I got out we went and flew the Citaborea.  We had to wear parachutes, which we sat on.  The pilot sat in the front and any passenger (me) sat in the back but there was a full set of controls at both positions.  My instructions were that if we got in trouble, I would bail out and dad would stay with the airplane to try to keep it from hurting anybody on the ground, bailing out himself at the last minute.

We did loops and snap rolls but I was too nervous to let him try a spin so we didn't do that.  Nobody had to bail out that day.

After fourth grade we moved to the Dallas suburb of Pleasant Grove (1966 - 1968) where dad was pastor at Centenary UMC (now Umphress Road Church).  Dad decided to get serious about flying and get his Commercial, then Instructor ratings.  (He had been Private all this time so far.)  He got connected with T.D. Brown at White Rock Airport in a nearby suburb and started into this training there.  It was also at Centenary that he considered changing careers and to become an air traffic controller.  He took the civil service test for this.  Mom and I think he probably failed it because he was too random of a thinker, but all we knew at the time was that thie pursuit didn't go any further.  He also looked into what it would take to get his Airframe and Powerplant (A&P) rating and go to work as an airplane or airline mechanic.  With very little work, we understand, he could have done this right out of the Air Force, but he hadn't.  It would have costed hundreds or thousands of dollars and several months without a paycheck at that point in life so nothing further came of that either, a tentative job offer in the midwest somewhere notwithstanding.

I don't know if it all happened while we lived there, but he did complete his Commercial rating, his CFI (Certified Flight Instructor), his instrument rating and his IFI (Instrument Flight Instructor) during this period.  It may well have all been with T.D. Brown instructing.

I was taken to White Rock Airport several times.  One day we watched a retractable gear plane land gear up.  No one was hurt but a lot of damage was done.  One year the day after Christmas (must have been 1967), dad and I flew from there to Henrietta and landed on the new grass airstrip out of town near somebody's ranch.  This was the trip where he taught me to navigate dead reckoning with section maps, a Jeppsen Plotter - wind triangle, a pencil, and my eyes looking out the window.  I imagine dad could have flown this trip up and back blindfolded by then, but he left me with the impression that it was my navigation skills that got us there and back that day.

This was the trip where we called Mildred Wines from the telephone at the unmanned airstrip.  She sent somebody out to drive us into town and we had Christmas leftovers at her house for lunch before returning to Dallas.

That airstrip was just a mile or so from the place where I'd crashed dad's Jeep through a gate on my first time driving it, age 8, just a few years earlier.

I don't know when it was, but dad also flew Dr. Strickland (the doctor who delivered Wilda) from Henrietta to a mental hospital (as a patient) somewhere sometime while we lived in Henrietta or Dallas.

It was out of White Rock that dad flew me and my church/boy scout friend Gary Hughes on a sight seeing trip one day.  One of the sights we saw was the nose of a 707 about a mile in front and 100 feet above us!  Dad, acting quickly and outside of "recommended procedure" as always, took the controls and dove to the left to get us out of the way.  I don't know what has happened to Gary's flying career since then.

From Pleasant Grove we moved to Taylor where dad was soon hooked up with the local airport proprietor Stewart Holmes.  Stewart had a Cessna 150 and a Champion (not Citaborea, but a utility class aircraft of similar design).  This is where I learned to fly before I learned to drive.  See my quip about this at "First Man" at the bottom of

Family.

Dad was a flight instructor by now and when I turned 14 we obtained a third class medical for me and I started taking lessons from him.  These lessons went on for about 40 hours of dual time and involved both airplanes at Taylor and a few others at various places thereafter.  I still have my logbook, which dad would never let me touch.  He did all the writing in it.  We did S turns across a road, power on and power off stalls, take offs, landing, and patterns, emergency procedures (forced landings), preflight inspections, taxiing, touch and goes, and all sorts of other training activities.

Near the end of the Taylor phase of the training, we went out in the Champion one day and did spins.  (Recall that I had missed out on spins in third grade.)  It was no longer required (too many students and instructors were cracking up on these "instructional" flights) but dad, always being old school about such things, insisted.  I can still remember it all vividly.  You pull up in a power-off stall, somewhat steeper than usual, then as it begins to break, rather than recovering, kick the rudder hard over and haul the stick all the way up in your lap.  The nose falls through the horizon as you roll sharply to the side and seems to point straight down with the earth rotating 10-12 RPM in front of you.  One wing is flying, the other is stalled.  After three turns, and a couple thousand feet lost, you recover.  Straighten the rudder, relax on the stick, but pull it out of the steep dive before the airspeed indicator gets far into the yellow arc.  This is why you had to be in a "utility" rated aircraft for this rather than "normal."  The recovery was tricky and you had to be right on top of what was happening (so to speak) to not "bend something," as dad would say.

I was not the natural pilot that dad was, but I picked it up well enough and, in retrospect, wouldn't trade for the unique experience.

To qualify for a Private license one needed a minimum of 20 hours dual and 20 hours solo (and to be 16 years old).  I had not solo'd by the time we moved to Hubbard (1971 - 1977).  Dad got set up with an outfit that operated out of the former Connolly Air Force Base (the site of Texas State Technical Institute, now TST College, where Wilda went).  One day after about three more hours in a Cessna 152 there, he had me pull over to the side of the runway after a landing, got out, and told me to take it around once by myself, which I did without incident.

Dad logged that solo time as 0.5 hours and three landings.  The log also contains about an hour of subsequent solo flight which I no longer recall at all.

It was tradition to cut your shirt-tail off and tack it on the wall after your first solo.  Mother was mad that a "perfectly good shirt" was ruined in this way.

Having been an Air Force Base, heavy aircraft were in the habit of using that strip for training.  We sometimes shared with big passenger-class planes out doing their own touch-and-goes.

(This is the same field where George W. Bush would land in Air Force One on the way to Crawford during his presidency.  See the note about this at the bottom of Family .)

I think there is a flying club at Baylor that operates out of that same facility today.

I took my driving test at an office less than two miles from there.  Some of that test was on the James Connolly (TSTI) campus.

I left for college (Baylor, 1974 - 1978) shortly thereafter.  I had picked up my own hobby, radio, as a 16 year old in Hubbard and our vocations and avocations diverged from that point.  It was on my todo list for several more years to finish my Private Pilot's license so I could be a missionary pilot or just because I had gotten so far without finishing.  It was also on my list for several years to get dad an amateur radio license.  My last Pilot Logbook entry was October 22, 1979 and dad never really developed an interest in radio as an end in itself.

After I left home, dad got very involved in the Civil Air Patrol where he was involved in some way for 22 years.  From college, I went with him to a couple of meetings, but spent most of the time sitting there daydreaming about radio circuits rather than paying attention to the flying yarns.

What I know about his CAP career is limited.  He was involved in lots of patrol and search missions.  A pilot would not close his flight plan, or an ELT (Emergency Locator Transmitter) would activate somewhere and he would be involved in combing the countryside from the air looking for them.  Sometimes they would find the "downed" plane parked in a locked hangar, the ELT having been activated accidentally by a rough landing.  Sometimes they would find the tail of the crashed airplane sticking out of a lake somewhere.  Most times the crash was found by someone else or resolve otherwise.

They were involved in border patrols where they were sometimes shot at by drug runners.

The other general activity of CAP was Solo Encampment that was held annually where a bunch of cadets, kids who had become involved in CAP kind of like Boy Scouts, were trained up to their first solo flight, much as I had been, but with a more compact schedule.  Dad went to this most years (and mom went along most times and did the wives program things).  As a flight instructor he was involved in ground school and air training for these cadets.  I didn't know any of these people and dad didn't talk about them much.  I have a little placard on my desk  that was given to dad at the end of one of these encampments.  In the shape of Texas, it says, "Oh", "... Witnesses Said."  "1994 Solo, Waco."

Part of dad's pedagogical technique was the telling of story after story of air mishaps, most of which ended with the words, "... Witnesses said."  I have a large scrapbook in the garage where dad clipped story after story of crashes out of the papers.

As the Waco group grew in political status, dad eventually found himself Texas Wing Chaplain, under his friend Colonel Scott, Texas Wing Commander.  This put him in a supervisory position over the other chaplains in Texas.  I think his ultimate rank was Major.  He told me once that to be a CAP Chaplain was exactly equivalent to being an Air Force Chaplain.  This was not true for the other positions.  To be Wing Commander, for instance, the qualifications were abbreviated from being an Air Force Wing Commander, as you might expect. CAP was (probably still is) an auxiliary of the U.S. Air Force and dad had some military privileges due to this position.

His military headstone only says "Private First Class" however.  That was his rank at the end of WWII.

This was the Colonel Scott who got married at the parsonage in Hubbard one summer while mom and Wilda were in Borger.  Viann and I went to the wedding.  That trip may have been the day she fell in love with me.

There was lots of flying outside of CAP.  Dad did some contract flying for O'Neal Oil Company for a while.  The proprietor owned an airplane but didn't always want to do his own flying.  Dad's only rule was that he couldn't be available for any duty on a Sunday.

All the airports and operators that he was involved with are beyond my memory.  We'd go visit mom's dad in Borger and, after a day or two, dad and I would drive out to the airport, rent a plane, and check out the countryside.  Somewhere near Waco there was a guy who ran a little airstrip out in the woods by the name of Stahl.  Everybody thought that was a funny joke, a pilot named Stahl (i.e. Stall).  I think Stahl died in an airplane crash.

There was another crash that sticks in memory, and it was the subject of one of those two CAP meetings I went to.  An airport operator somewhere south of Wortham (1977 - 1981) (maybe Teague, maybe Corsicana) had taken his four year-old granddaughter out on a flight around the patch one evening near dusk.  Fog had unexpectedly come in making their landing dangerous and they didn't make it.  Due to a miscommunication or misunderstanding no one called for help until late in the night and by the time they found them, early the next morning, crashed about a mile from the end of the runway, they were dead.

Some time later, when Katy was about four, dad was supposed to take her flying one day when we were visiting Hillsboro.  With this story still fairly fresh in mind, dad and I were both a little nervous.  Katy, even at four, was pressing for this but finally dad said, "It's too windy to go today."  This may or may not have been strictly true, but I was relieved in any case.

Dad was always doing some instructing.  He always worked for $10 an hour, which is not a modern wage for such jobs.

And I can't remember all the stories either.  There was the day he was checking out Mr. Holmes Champion after a rebuild ("test flight" he called it) and the engine quit on final approach.  He landed "dead stick" safely and regaled us with that tale for years.  There was the day that his airplane was leaking fuel.  You could see the vapor trail, a thin cloud, forming behind it.  I learned all sorts of useful things watching these near disasters.  There was the day that dad called a forced landing on me right off the end of the runway on take off and we were clipping the tops of corn plants in the field across the highway before he called it off and we went on around.  Mr. Holmes spoke to dad about that incident ... later.

There was one story he (for some reason) he liked to tell where a student had frozen at the controls and the airplane was radpily accelerating into a well named "graveyard spiral."  (Graveyard spirals are not something that students are supposed to experience for obvious reasons, but in training you talk a lot about them so that you will recognize one if it happens.)  Dad had to make a double fist to knock the guy away from the controls before he could take over and recover.

This was the only time I knew of dad ever striking anyone.  (Well, actually, there was a a story about his dad coming home drunk and threatening his mother when dad was a teenager ... but I don't know anything except that dad "decked him."  He wouldn't talk about it.)

Mother didn't like hearing these stories, not in person and not when she was hearing dad's half of them while dad sat the phone for hours on end talking to his buddies.   She was (and is) resentful of all the time that dad spent with those guys.  The phone calls at odd hours, the trips, some of them overnight, for various flying or CAP duties.  For year after year, decade after decade, she didn't usually know when he would come home from these adventures.  She didn't know when the phone rang that it wouldn't be someone with news that dad hadn't managed to get a student off of the controls in time....

As dad told me time and time again, "It only takes once."

She said, after he was gone, "I just don't understand being so obsessed with ... a machine!"

One day, it may have been winter of 1999 or 2000, he was getting his routine airman's medical and he was having trouble.  The doctor told him that he could bend the rules a little and pass him this time, but that he probably wouldn't be able to do it for many more years.  Dad said, in his characteristic way, "Stop right there," and refused to go on with the process.  He walked away without a valid pilot's license for the first time in over fifty years.  He had known all along that this day would eventually come and he ended it with his usual dramatic flair.  He was grounded from then on.

He went home and wanted to have a talk with mom, apologizing for all those years of danger and uncertainty.  She wouldn't hear of it and walked out on him.  I would have too.  It was disingenuous.

When I heard this news, however, I was worried for dad's well being.  I doubted that he would live much longer now that flying was gone from his life.  And, indeed, he didn't.

Lots of people came through the receiving line at the funeral and identified themselves as being involved in CAP or flying in some form.  Some of them were in uniform.  I didn't know but two or three of them.  Colonel Scott and his new wife (this must have been his third, the one whose wedding Viann and I witnessed having passed away herself, having been his second) came by the house.  Scott told me that he didn't have words for the occasion, that such had always been dad's job as Chaplain.  He told me that there had been many times when dad was the one to bring the news to shocked family members about what the CAP had found in a search, out at some lonely air field where some had gathered to wait.

We called people everywhere with the news but I couldn't get hold of T.D. Brown from White Rock.  Years before they had to close White Rock and the property was built out with houses.  T.D. had moved his operation to Rockwall where he had stayed until he retired.  The people who answered the phone knew who I was asking for but he wasn't flying anymore and didn't come in much.  The Browns were personal friends.  There are many stories there too.  Dad had been their de-facto pastor when T.D.'s stepson was killed as a teenager on a Dallas freeway.  It was T.D.'s son Charlie (Brown...) who didn't button down an engine access right one day and ended up doing a forced landing on a different freeway.  He was uninjured but had damaged the airplane and torn up a light pole.  The punch line to that story was always:  "The city sent him a bill for the light pole!"

At this point, I wish I could remember and write down all the stories.  For all I know, T.D. and Scott and Dalton Watts and all the hundreds of faces in these stories are gone now themselves.  And, I don't even remember all the stories in which I was a player.  Looking through my logbook today (2010 March 26), it is a world class collection of dad's signatures.  I only remember about 20% of the flights that are recorded there.  I have no recollection at all about the rest.  But, the view out the window from a spin, the power stalls, the nausea....  All the things I take for granted knowing about that lots of other people couldn't imagine, like knowing what's going on in with commercial airplane just from the way it "feels."  I wouldn't trade those for anything.  I wasn't the pilot that dad was, but I wouldn't change a thing about eithe of us.

That gives you the chronology of it, at least from my memory.  And, more importantly, it gives you the flavor of the experience of growing up when I did with the dad that I had.  He was really a pilot first, a preacher by vocation, and a family man after hours.  What remarkable times we have lived in and extraordinary things we have done!

(c) Courtney B. Duncan 2008, 2010.  For Viannah.