HOWARD — “I could talk about flying all day long,” said Jim Wilson, 83, with a big smile. “I had my first airplane ride when I was 6 years old. My sister ... she was 5 ... and I took a ride in an open-cockpit plane. She wanted to stand up and look around, so I was hanging on to her so she wouldn’t fall out.”
With that first ride, his career choice was made.
“I knew what I wanted to do and I pursued that at every opportunity,” Wilson said.
He served in the U.S. Marines as an aircraft mechanic, working on F6 Hellcats. He began flying DC-3s for Lake Central Airlines, which was purchased by Allegheny Airlines, which eventually became United Airlines. After 33 1/2 years as a commercial aviation pilot, Wilson retired in 1985, having logged 35,000 hours in the air. He was also an aircraft mechanic and a flight instructor and, just once, parachuted “just to see what it was like.” He liked doing snap rolls and other aerobatics in his private planes, and said he loved his job as an airline pilot, loved going to work and, after retiring more than two decades ago, still misses his job.
What is it about flying?
“I can’t tell you, but I just love it,” said Wilson. “Maybe it’s the freedom. You get out there and see the scenery, especially in the fall ... oh my.”
Wilson has another favorite hobby: Farming. He and his wife, Dottie, lived for 51 years on a farm near Sunbury.
“You really have to be focused and have all your attention on what you’re doing when you’re flying,” said Wilson. “But I could come back on the farm and get on a tractor and just completely relax.”
Each of the couple’s two sons picked up one of their father’s passions. Steve is a pilot and lives in Philadelphia; David is a farmer near Sunbury.
Wilson said he has always enjoyed helping young people discover aviation; he just naturally passes on his happy enthusiasm. One day he took then-12-year-old Roger Quinn of Mount Vernon under his wing when Quinn was flying alone on a commercial flight; today Quinn is a successful pilot for United Parcel Service.
When Dottie — his “perfect wife,” said Wilson — became ill and needed long-term care, they sold their farm and moved to Knox County, near Howard and Millwood, and bought another farm. Wilson said they were drawn here by the “good people” who attend the Eastside Church of Christ in Mount Vernon, where Wilson also attends. Dottie passed away late last year.
Wilson built a slightly rolling grass runway on his farm, the first he’s had that has a knoll in the middle. He put wider-than-stock tires on his little Maule MX7 so that it could “roll over the groundhog holes.”
The Maule is a short takeoff and landing plane, although Wilson’s runway is 2,600 feet. Maules are built as bush planes, and Wilson can get his plane up in the air and down on the ground from a short runway or in and out of pasture fields, if need be. His 2006 plane still has that new airplane smell.
The first time he took off from the farm, he made a big impression ... on the neighbors’ sheep.
“I was trying to figure out where to put the runway and I’m flying around and all the sudden the sheep took off. I thought, ‘Uh-oh.’ So I apologized to my neighbors and met the nicest people,” Greg and Beverly Miller, whose farm is next door. “Now, about 30 of the old sheep come out to watch me land. It’s the lambs that get scared.”
The Maule sets alone in Wilson’s large hangar, which is so big that he can turn the plane around inside it.
“It’s one little airplane in a great big hangar,” said Wilson, and the plane is so light that he can pull it backward and forward with only a bit of assistance.
One of his favorite activities is the yearly party he throws for neighbors and friends, a tradition he and Dottie started on their Sunbury farm.
“I love to drop candy from the air for the children,” he said. “A lady from church goes up with me. We call her the bombardier.”
He explained how he constructed a candy container from a PVC tube, with one end enclosed, so that it can easily be tipped downward and emptied into the air without blowing away.
“One time, though,” Wilson said, “the wind changed just as we dropped the candy and it all landed in my son’s soybean field. The kids went in after it, but it was OK ... my son said the soybeans weren’t any good anyway. But, boy, I love to do that. I think that next year I’m going to have to get a bigger tube.”
