I’ve met a lot of interesting people in my lifetime. Some were highly educated, some were successful businessmen, and some had enough credentials hanging on their walls to wallpaper a small house.
But one of the most remarkable men I ever met was a farmer in bib overalls named Earl.
I met Earl in the early 1980s at the little airport in Safford, Arizona. He didn’t look like anybody’s idea of an aviation expert. He looked like what he was: a farmer.
But Appearances Can Be Deceiving
Earl had never attended flight school. He didn’t even have a pilot’s license. His father owned farmland and a crop-dusting airplane, and one day he essentially told Earl to get in and learn to fly it.
And that’s exactly what Earl did.
Over the years, he learned about navigation, radio procedures, and flying techniques by asking questions of pilots passing through the airport. He listened, learned, and remembered.
I was fortunate enough to have an airplane available during those years, and I flew almost every day, sometimes for no other reason than the joy of being in the air.
I flew everything from hang gliders and ultralights to a Cessna 172 and eventually a pressurized Cessna P-210, the highest-performa...