June 25, 2019 Airplanes and Eateries

The Liberty Gazette

June 25, 2019

Ely Air Lines
By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely

Mike: The familiar sound of taxiing aircraft lured me out of the cool shade in our hangar. Reverberation from twin propellers rattled all the heavy metal doors. Two Cessna Skyhawks soon appeared rounding the far end of the row of T-hangars. They waltzed their way along, stopping a few units away.

As their engines clattered to a stop, I sauntered over to my hangar neighbors Selby and O.J. to say hi and find out where they’d been. They don’t usually go far, maybe just a quick flight across the bay to Anahuac. They’ll throw bikes in the back of their planes to ride the six or seven minutes from the airport to the Dairy Queen on Ross Sterling Avenue. The destination isn’t as important as the flight. They don’t need much of a reason, they do it just to fly.

Then the process starts. It’s nearly a ritual: move their cars out of the hangars, carefully push their planes back in, start wiping bugs off the wings. They don’t use anything exotic, just Pledge. They clean their windows, check the oil, maybe adjust something on the engine or airframe. When they’ve finished, it’s just as important to check out what the other has done and talk about it at length. Maybe give advice. Inevitably, someone will show up to offer unsolicited ideas. This is a regular pilot ritual at friendly little airports across the country; first you fly, then you clean and fix, which often takes longer than the flight, then you talk about it.

On Saturday mornings several pilot friends meet for breakfast with the intention of deciding where to fly next. From Baytown, where most of them roost, there are half a dozen places within a half hour flight.

Lufkin has a diner on the airport as does the Texas Gulf Coast Regional airport in Brazoria. Brenham’s Southern Flyer Diner recently reopened for business. Local pilots cheered as did the residents of Brenham who dine while watching airplanes come and go. Liberty’s Jax Hamburgers was recently descended upon by the Baytown group. They used the airport’s crew vehicle to shuttle more than a dozen visiting aviators to the eatery. With copious amounts of burgers and fries consumed, would that added weight prevent their takeoff?

Pilots don’t need a reason to fly, but if there is a nice place to go just for an excuse, that’s enough. Last weekend the place to go was Weiser Air Park on the west side of Houston. This time, it wasn’t pilots’ love of food that provided the impetus. It was to say good-bye. After 56 years, “the country’s friendliest airport” is shutting down. The land that holds its privately owned thirty-four-hundred-foot runway will become an industrial park. The owners hosted a huge going-away party with barbeque and ice cream for the pilot community and anyone else who happened by. While pilots use anything for a reason to fly, the journey home from this affair did so with a heavy heart.

ElyAirLines.blogspot.com

June 18, 2019 Waterjets and Water Crossings

The Liberty Gazette

June 18, 2019

Ely Air Lines

By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely

Linda: I had a dental check-up last week. My hygienist, Lynn, is a dear friend, but bless her heart, she is so fearful of flying. She asks lots of questions, but I suspect she might not remember my answers after I leave because, after all, that’s not something in her daily life.

Cleaning teeth, however, is quite important to her. She’s made a career out of dental hygiene and she’s quite good at it. I trust her with my… teeth.

There is just one thing though that makes me very nervous. I thought it was a water-blasting device she uses for cleaning. The first time I told her it scares me, she laughed and asked why. Well, there was this time we toured Ace Machine in Baytown. It’s owned by our friend and fellow pilot Jim Kubik. He hosted a whole group of us at his business on a Saturday and took us from one huge machine to another, explaining what all they can do with these monsters. The men (which was most of the group) were practically frothing at the mouth. But I thought it was fascinating, too.

One of those machines uses water to cut steel. Ironically, it’s called a waterjet. Jim fired it up, told everyone to keep their hands down, and demonstrated the astounding precision and power, cutting an eight-inch piece of steel. I stood there mesmerized by the needle-like water, knowing it could slice a hand off. My trips to the dentist have never been the same since.

Actually, Lynn uses is an ultrasonic tool called a cavitron. It sprays a mist, but the effect is often described as giving teeth a power wash. It feels like a waterjet. I tense up when she grabs that tool, probably just like she does at the thought of flying.

Mike: The customer service representatives who work with me are not pilots. Their job is to schedule clients for training in jets. Pilots who fly high performance aircraft are required to pass evaluation every six to twelve months. But those who set the calendar that commits instructor time for customers from around the world don’t have a background in aviation. Theirs is administration. A co-worker has found he can take advantage of the knowledge gap.

Every time Linda and I travel to another continent, David finds it amusing to see the reaction when he tells the customer service staff that we are flying our little single-engine airplane “across the pond.” The unsuspecting employees have bought into David’s joke that we fly the Elyminator the same distance as airliners.

Truth is, the shortest distance from Gander, Newfoundland to Shannon, Ireland is almost 2,000 miles over cold water. The Elyminator’s maximum range is less than half that. Airliners also travel more than three times our plane’s speed. But all is fair in work and play, even when co-workers don’t realize that if we flew the Elyminator to Europe, we would arrive there a week after our vacation ended.

ElyAirLines.blogspot.com

June 11, 2019 What's An Airplane Nut?

The Liberty Gazette

June 11, 2019

Ely Air Lines
By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely

For four months out of the year, Coda Riley works from sunrise to sunset every day. It’s a grueling schedule for a grueling job, and he loves it.

He’s recently certified as a firefighting Level 2 S.E.A.T. pilot (single engine air tanker) and has worked as an ag pilot for years. When crop dusting, he estimates he makes about 70 take-offs and landings a day and turns around over the fields he’s spraying about 2000 times. That takes a lot of arm muscle, and a pilot must be vigilant always.

But flying, he says, is like a cat. “A cat just picks you. You don’t own a cat; a cat owns you. Flying is like that. It owns you.”

It picked him when he was two years old. His parents were driving to their new house in the country when he saw a crop duster. “I saw it, heard the noise, and they were flying on the deck. In that moment, I knew what I wanted.”

Nobody in Coda’s family was a pilot and no one wanted him to fly, so he had to figure out on his own how one becomes a pilot. About ten years after his first glimpse of a crop duster, his family was driving through Port Neches for a church event when they passed a house where a man was working on a small airplane (an ultra-light) in the yard. Glued to the truck window, Coda would remember that house.

A few years later, his father bought a new home just two blocks from where he’d seen the ultra-light. Coda walked over to the house and waited, eager to meet the man with the airplane. Finally, a truck pulled up, and Coda caught the man between the truck and front door.

“Hi, my name is Coda and I’m an airplane nut!”

When the man asked him, “What?” he thought he’d blown his opportunity, but he repeated himself. The man chuckled. “Oh, well my name’s Charlie. Come on in.”

“Doc” Charlie Smith showed Coda his full-size airplane and the ultra-light and invited him to a fly-in at Pleasure Island the next weekend. At the fly-in, Doc asked Coda if he would like to try the balloon-popping contest. Coda nailed the first balloon, then the second, third and fourth. He won second place in the contest, despite never having flown. The following week, Doc gave him his first real flight lesson.

Coda admired and respected Doc – he was his hero. He had shot down two Japanese Zeroes during World War II, was an instructor and had flown over 200 missions over Burma and China. After the first lesson, he said Coda was most natural pilot he’d ever met.

When Doc received a package from the Chinese containing the Distinguished Flying Cross, Coda was there when he opened it. A moment he will always treasure; one that he carries with him on those hot, grueling days from sun-up to sundown, in some of the highest risk non-combat flying that exists.

ElyAirLines.blogspot.com

June 4, 2019 Azellia White

The Liberty Gazette

June 4, 2019

Ely Air Lines
By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely

You may know of the American Cowboy Museum in South Houston. It’s on Almeda Road near Airport Boulevard, on the Taylor-Stevenson Ranch. You may know of a drill bit that can drill through rock, invented by Hughes Tool Company. That invention came out of the drilling at what was known as Pierce Junction field, on the ranch near where that museum is. You may know of the owners of that ranch, of the daring love story of Edward Taylor and Ann George, that she was purchased by Edward’s parents as a slave to take care of him, but the two fell in love, lived openly as husband and wife, bought 640 acres and raised six children on it. There is so much more to their story, which hopefully you know. But if you don’t, please learn it. Their ranch is a place rich in pioneering history.

There’s another part to the story of the Taylor-Stevenson Ranch that fits well within this space. That is, of course, an airport, Sky Ranch, built by some of the best pilots ever.

The Tuskegee Airmen were military pilots (fighter and bomber) who fought in World War II. They formed the 332nd Fighter Group and the 477th Bombardment Group of the United States Army Air Force. The name also applies to the navigators, bombardiers, mechanics, instructors, crew chiefs, nurses, cooks and other support personnel.

At the end of World War II, three Tuskegee Airmen relocated to Houston to start a flight training program and offer charter flights and cargo services. They set out to make it possible for young black G.I.’s and civilians to learn about aviation. Ben Stevenson, Elton “Ray” Thomas, and Hulon “Pappy” White were those Airmen.

Pappy White had worked as a mechanic while in Tuskegee, and when he and his bride moved to Houston, they continued to make history.

Born in 1913 in Gonzales, Texas, Azellia White is now 105. But there she was in Tuskegee, Alabama, 32 years old, when First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt came to visit the famous pilots during
World War II. When Mrs. Roosevelt insisted on taking a ride with one of them, Mrs. White was inspired to learn to fly.

She began training in a Taylorcraft with a set of flight instructors anybody would want to have, yet not just anyone would have access to. Thanks to excellent training by the Tuskegee Airmen, she became the first black female from Texas to earn a pilot certificate. That was March 26, 1946, when it was safer for blacks to fly from town to town than to drive.

She continued her flying here in Texas, but Sky Ranch was only in business for two years, closing its doors when the G.I. bill was modified with restrictions that affected the business of flight training.

But Mrs. Azellia White continues to inspire young aviators. The Aviation Science Lab at Houston’s
Sterling High School is named in her honor, and last April, she was inducted into the Texas Aviation Hall of Fame.

ElyAirLines.blogspot.com