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.

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