I had never been in an airplane until shortly before I left for college. I was a radio amateur, with the call sign of K4KDF, and joined the Civil Air Patrol (CAP) to extend my opportunities to be a radio operator. As a cadet in the CAP, I was afforded the opportunity for an orientation flight in a Cessna 172. I still remember the details of the radio exchanges between the pilot and the tower at Birmingham Airport. After that flight, I was hooked.
The original plan for MIT was to major in electrical engineering, but when aeronautical engineering beckoned instead, I was receptive. That led to flying lessons at Lawrence Airport. As I recall, a Cessna 150 rented for $15/hour, and the instructor was another $5/hour. During the summers, when I earned more money, I could afford to fly one hour each week. During the school year, I could afford only one hour per month, but I did what I could. My instructor, Buzz something, was a fireplug of a man, who flew well, but seemed to resent college students--and probably any young person who could afford to take flying lessons.
I got my private license shortly after I graduated, on 9 August 1966, and flew regularly after that, when I was in the Navy at Pensacola, and in Atlanta. On one of my frequent vacation trips from Atlanta to Daytona Beach with my buddy Bill Sheesley, we realized that Apollo 15 was scheduled to launch. I rented a 172 at the Daytona Beach airport, and we orbited over the Banana River and watched the launch. We were able to fly closer than I expected, and the sight and sound was spectacular.
After I moved to Washington, I bought a Cessna 172, N1536Y. The price was $6,500. Three-six-Yankee initially was based at Gathersburg, a small airport north of Washington, with grass tie-down areas. Before long, I moved 36-Yankee to Dulles, which was not nearly as busy then as now. Dulles had two parallel 11,000 foot runways which dwarfed 36-Yankee. On one occasion, I was taking some people for a ride, and we were doing a leisurely pre-takeoff run up when a deep voice in my headphone said, "We're waiting for you 36-Yankee." I looked over my shoulder to see a Lufthansa 747 several yards behind us on the taxiway. I hurriedly completed the run-up, got my clearance from the tower, taxied onto the runway, and took off. The 747 taxied onto the runway behind us.
After I bought 36-Yankee, I flew constantly. A favorite activity was to take one of my buddies, usually Sterling Brinkley, put our two ten-speed bicycles in the back seat, fly to upstate New York, North Carolina, or the Shenandoah Valley, tie down the airplane at an FBO, do a multi-day bicycle trip, and then fly back.
I flew the airplane down to Roanoke, Virginia to take the Virginia bar exam, with plans to fly to Alabama afterwards to go further south to Alabama after the bar exam. The weather was kind of iffy. I inadvertently flew into a cloud over the mountains west of Roanoke, and safely extracted myself to return to the Ronoke airport, after a moment of disorientation. That scared me considerably, and I decided that I would get my instrument rating.
Not long after, I moved to Philadelphia to work for Conrail. I rented an apartment in Salem Harbor, because it was near the North Philadelphia Airport, where I based 36-Yankee, and began working on my instrument rating. Bill Spych was my usual instructor. He was a young, buff, charismatic guy who concluded almost every flight by saying, "We cheated death again!"
Preparation for and passing the instrument written exam was not particularly challenging or traumatic. Spych and I continued to work on instrument proficiency under the the hood. He was always particularly exuberant when I did a good job of flying a course toward a vortac station. Often, he would shout, "take it off and look down" just as the two-from flag flipped, indicating station passage. I would comply and look down to see the white cone of the vortac antenna as we flew directly over it.
Three-six-Yankee was instrument equipped, but it didn't have a glideslope receiver. Accordingly, I had to do some of the training in one of the Piper Cherokees that Spych also used for flight instruction at the PNE FBO. The Cherokee was kind of a dog compared to my 172 and had a midadjusted turn and bank indicator. When I took my check ride with the FAA examiner on 16 August 1977, I screwed up the partial panel approach to Trenton airport and was busted on the partial-panel procedure. I subsequently convinced myself that it was because of the inaccurate turn and bank indicator. I nursed my hurt pride for a while and eventually decided to go get proficient on partial panel maneuvering in a serious way. The following summer, I flew down the Manassas, Virginia airport, where I had frequently flown from before buying 36-Yankee, and rented a nearby motel room. I worked on finishing my instrument rating on a more or less full-time basis. This included simulator work as well as actual flight time. Within a week or so, I easily passed the rest of the practical test, which comprised a checkride with an FAA examiner only on partial panel approaches. I qualified and received my instrument rating on 9 July 1978.
Actual and simulated instrument flying really improved my precision and confidence. Maintaining altitude within a foot or two and airspeed within a knot or two now was second nature. I grew skilled at copying revised clearances in flight while battling the paper chart, which always tried to wrap itself around my neck while I was trying to write down the new clearance and read it back to the controller.
Now qualified to fly IFR, I was in a better position to fly 36-Yankee in conjunction with my work for Conrail. I took the airplane to Washington for about half of the frequent business trips there. Typically, we would fly into Washington National, which always was a thrill. The typical VFR approach was to meander south over the Anacostia River, cross the Potomac and then, too often, be set up on an approach to Runway 18 or 36, intermingled between 727s whose stall speeds were greater than the never-exceed speed of 36-Yankee. Then, at the last minute, the controllers would have us break off our approach and land on a shorter, intersecting runway.
I remember flying with Jeff Braff, one of my young lawyers, in pretty serious IFR conditions to the Buffalo airport to get a federal-court injunction against a strike. I also remember couple of IFR flights to New England and the challenge of trying to avoid really heavy weather by a combination of the sound of rain on the airframe, the intensity of the raindrops on the windscreen, and negotiations with air traffic controllers whose radar did not paint weather very distinctly. I was just coming back from one of these flights. The weather was VFR, and it was beginning to get dark as I noticed an anomaly in my directional gyro over Connecticut. After debating whether I should continue, I landed, left the airplane in the care of the FBO and figured out how to take a train to Manhattan and then back to Philadelphia.
Another adventure was flying Jon Brock down to Hilton Head Island for a couple of days.
The longest trip in 36-Yankee was the one I had planned and aborted after the Virginia bar exam: North Philadelphia to Atlanta to Tuscaloosa, followed by a couple of days in Tuscaloosa exploring old haunts, and then down to Daytona Beach, where I would meet my parents. Building cumulus clouds all the way, with updrafts south of Montgomery that forced me to request deviation from my assigned altitude, and ATC help in dodging thunderstorms south of Jacksonville. I gave my parents a ride from the Daytona Beach airport to a small grass strip to the west, where they had some friends. Then it was back to Pennsylvania, without any significant incidents.
On the Atlanta-Tuscaloosa leg, I was climbing out of Peachtree DeKalb Airport and had reached about 10,000 feet over western Georgia when a tremendous vibration attacked the aircraft. Initially, I thought the prop had somehow become unbalanced, perhaps having lost a tip or something. I called Atlanta Center and told them that I needed to identify an airport for a forced landing. The response in immediate, and I could easily see several airports down below. I richened the mixture and played with the throttle. I didn't seem to help. Then I switched tanks. The engine smoothed out after a few moments. I told the controller I had solved the problem and would resume my flight plan. He seemed a bit skeptical. I made it to Tuscaloosa without further incident, but I was damned worried about fuel state during the last few miles from Birmingham to Tuscaloosa. I should have landed to check out the source of the problem or at least done a more precise job of planning how much fuel I had in the one tank to make it to Tuscaloosa with a reasonable reserve.
Once I got to Tuscaloosa, I told the fixed base operator to drain the offending tank. My hypothesis was that the FBO at Peachtree DeKalb had put the wrong grade of gasoline in that tank or maybe even jet fuel. I never received very solid confirmation of that, and I should have detected a wrong grade of fuel in my preflight at Peachtree DeKalb.
After I left Conrail and joined the Villanova law faculty, I bought a condo in King of Prussia and moved. It made sense relocate 36-Yankee. My friend David and Bert Fortney agreed to help with the logistics. Bert was going to ride with me in 36-Yankee, and David would drive their car to our Brandywine Airport destination. I preflighted the airplane, and David left. I noticed on our taxi to the runway that the brakes seemed ineffective, but I rationalized that I could get them checked at the destination. It would be a huge inconvenience to abort the flight at North Philly with David waiting for us at the other end. This was a couple of years before cell phones. We took off and had an uneventful flight to Brandywine. The approach and touchdown were fine, but there were no brakes at all. It was clear that we were going to run off the end of the runway unless I did something. I seriously considered ground looping, but I had never the maneuver and not entirely sure it was a good idea in a tricycle-gear airplane, so I told Bert to brace herself, unlatch her door, and be prepared to get out of the airplane immediately when it came to a stop. I pulled the mixture control, switched the fuel selector valve off, turned off the master switch and the ignition and unlatched my door. We went off the end of the runway, down a steep grassy embankment and came to rest amid some medium-size bushes. It was all in slow-motion and I felt focused on the steps I knew I should take. It was only afterwards but my hands begin to shake a little.
It wasn't long before the fixed base manager arrived, having watched our approach and the ensuing mishap. David, Bert, and I found each other and, after I made arrangements to have the airplane towed to the hangar where it could be repaired, they took me home, congratulating me on handling the emergency well.
I don't recall being reluctant to fly after that, but I was busy with my new teaching job and coming out of the closet. I suppose, looking back, it was like I was embarking on a new era in my life. Flying was associated with an old era. In any event, I flew only a couple hours in the next year, and made 36-Yankee available to my good friend Bob Swert, Conrail’s vice president for labor relations. He was taking flying lessons, and I was a lot cheaper for him to take them in 36-Yankee than to rent an airplane. After about a year, in 1982, I arranged to donate 36-Yankee to a local charity. It was obvious by then that I was flying so little that made no sense for me to own an airplane.
After a flying hiatus of about fifteen years, Mitchell gave me, as a Christmas or birthday present, a couple of hours of flight time at Palwaukee airport, not far from Glencoe. I went out, took my biennial flight review in a Beech Sundowner and flew fairly regularly for a couple months. I took Phillip and Mitchell for ride. Phillip went to sleep, and Mitchell was terrified, so flying tailed off again after a while.
Then, in the summer of 2012, I began work on my fourth novel, Chad and the SEALs. All my novels have some kind of technology as a mainstay of the story, and I decided this one would feature airplane flying. An early chapter described, in some detail, flying lessons for the protagonists. As I described the steps for pre-flighting a Cessna 172, taking off, and student pilots’ first few turns in the pattern and work on stalls and other maneuvers, I found myself wanting to experience it again. I made arrangements to renew my medical, and scheduled some flight time at Palwaukee for 6 October– this time with the Cessna operator. I flew for the first time in 12 years and was pleasantly surprised with my performance on the biannual flight review. The instructor signed me off after a little more than an hour. I didn't feel like I was competent again yet, and insisted on another hour of dual instruction.
There was a delay in getting my medical approved and I was wondering how much more airplane dual I needed or wanted to pay for, when a thought flashed into my mind: I always wanted to learn to fly helicopters. I did a Google search and discovered that Midwestern Helicopter had a training helicopter based at Palwaukee. I called the number shown on the website and talked to Chris Laskey, the chief pilot and owner. We scheduled some helicopter time for 20 October 20. I went up to Kenosha, because only a Robinson R44 was based at Palwaukee, and it cost a hundred dollars an hour more than the two-place R 22. Chris briefed me, took me up, let me fly straight and level – which I did reasonably well, thanks to my 450 hours of airplane time. There were two obvious challenges immediately, however. In an airplane, one uses the rudder pedals in turns to counteract what’s called the “adverse yaw effect”—the tendency of the airplane to move its nose (yaw) in the wrong direction when one banks for a turn. A helicopter has no rudder, and one doesn’t use the pedals in the same way. Second, every airplane pilot has the stall speed drilled into him. One always keeps the speed on approach comfortably above the stall speed. A helicopter approach to a landing requires gradual reduction of airspeed to zero before setting down on the ground. The first time I saw the airspeed indicator drifting below sixty knows and then inexorably downward, I thought, Oh shit! and could hardly resist the tendency to push forward on the cyclic stick to bring the airspeed back up.
I was completely hooked. Chris and I sat down after the flight. He was candid about cost. This wasn't a big issue for me as it would've been earlier in my life. He counseled that it would probably good to fly at least once a week in the early stages of instruction. I said my schedule would permit a frequency of one or two flights per week. In the event, it was more like three.
In that first meeting, he we discovered that we both had encountered Dr. Klemptner, a cantankerous 90-year-old medical examiner who screwed up my application. In passing, Chris mentioned that one of his instructors was only 20 years old. I was intrigued with the possibility of taking flight instruction from someone younger than my law students, so I scheduled my next lesson with Eliot Sprague.
Eliot became one of my closest friends. As my flight instructor, he coached me to the point of allowing me to solo in the R22.We took our mandatory dual cross country to Dubuque on June 14 and saw the fireworks coming back. He was supportive when I flunked my FAA check ride because of being too slow on lowering the collective on a simulated engine failure, and he eventually got me to a succesful completion of my commercial helicopter ticket, in October of 2015.
Eliot's and my mutual interest in flying branched out from helicopters in three directions: into drones, into the activation of a Chicago heliport,, and into buying an airplane together.
The Mooney purchase was the result of a forecast line of thunderstorms around the bottom of Lake Michigan.
"Whatever happened to Hank and Eliot?" the email had read that morning.
I emailed him. "Could you be available tomorrow. We'll come out."
Eliot and I scurried around and booked a flight from ORD to SFO. I was wearing shorts and had nothing besides basic shaving gear for the original Cessna trip to Ohio. All the way to SFO, we were laughing about the impulsiveness of it all.
We nicknamed the airplane, N3241F, "Speedbrakes," because it had speedbrakes--protrusions that the pilot could cause to be raised on the top of the wings to kill lift.
Somewhere during this process, I asked myself, "Do I really want to spend $50,000 on an airplane?" I concluded that the answer was "yes," because I was spending it on a project that would expand the opportunities Eliot and I had to fly together. We always had a ball, in whatever we did.
But then, my flying came to an end with a minor stroke, apparently suffered while I was flying a helicopter over a recreation area in southern Wisconsin.
We subscribed to Trade a Plane and began searching ads for Mooneys. Eliot was inclined to be interested in high-performance airplanes, and I felt a sense of “been there done that” with respect to Cessnas, because of my experience with 36 Yankee. We had been to Wisconsin and we had flown two Mooneys, and were scheduled to fly a rented Cessna to a small airport near Cleveland to fly another. This was July, and thunderstorms were common. I drove to Elliott's and waited for him to get off work, planning to drive together up to the small airport in southern Wisconsin where we had rented the Cessna. When he got there, we reviewed the worsening letter and agreed that a flight around the bottom of Lake Michigan was not prudent.
We went inside and emailed our regrets to the owner of the Ohio Mooney. Then, I remembered an email I had gotten that morning. It said, “Whatever happened to Hank and Eliot?” We had corresponded with its author about his Mooney, N3241F, which was just what we have been looking for, but it was in Hayward, California, across the bay from San Francisco.
We agreed to buy the airplane on that first trip, but we had to arrange for it to be inspected locally and to find a flight instructor who could check us out in it. It certainly was not safe to fly an airplane halfway across the country that neither of us had qualified in, and any insurance coverage was going to require that we get checked out and signed off by flight instructor. After many phone calls to local flight schools, we found a flight instructor available for the weekend after the inspection was complete, when Eliot was not on duty. We flew back to the San Francisco, took a taxi to the airport, found Speedbrakes waiting for us, and met the flight instructor, who proceeded to check out Eliot and then me, with the other as a passenger in the backseat.
We had lunch, confirmed our flight plans and the weather forecast, and took off. Eliot flew the first leg, to Logan, Utah. Things went smoothly, except for some confusion with the Las Vegas, Nevada air traffic controllers over our route of flight. We had bought portable oxygen equipment and used it for the portion of our flight at 11,500 feet. Speedbrakes was smooth and really fast. Along the way, we watched the terrain below us and made small talk about the best emergency landing areas if we had an engine failure.
We got to Logan, refueled and tied down Speedbrakes and were at something of a loss on how we were going to get into town. The airport was deserted, though we had arrived just before a beautiful sunset across the Rocky Mountains. Then a young couple materialized after a day in their sailplane. We helped them load the sailplane onto their trailer, and they offered to give us a ride into a hotel.
The weather was generally good, although we knew it might get a bit unpredictable the further east we got. The second leg was from Logan to O'Neill, Nebraska, where we planned to refuel, have lunch, and then proceed to the Chicago area. I flew this leg. It also went smoothly, although it was interesting to have to plan my descent so far in advance because of our high altitude and to use Speedbrakes speekbrakes to control our speed in the descent.
We landed at the O'Neill airport, refueled, and took the airport courtesy car into town to a small café, where we had lunch. After lunch we went back to the airport, checked the weather again, and taxied out for takeoff. Some low mountains lay off the departure end of the runway, and we carefully calculated, to make sure our rate of climb and the distance was such that we would easily clear them. We took off, climbed to about 500 feet above ground level toward the mountains, and the engine quit. No spattering. Just quit dead. Eliot immediately lowered the landing gear and made a 180, asking me if I thought we could make it back to the airport. I didn't think we could, and I told him so. So I started calling out power lines, which we wanted to avoid in making a forced landing. Farmland was below us, and we picked out a green alfalfa field and set up an approach. At the last minute it became clear that our flight path and ground roll might cause Speedbrakes to be terminated by running into a toolshed, and Eliot altered the approach slightly to the right.
There was no sense of panic or excitement. Both of us had been trained on what to do, and we simply implemented our training. Eliot implemented it perfectly. We landed on the alfalfa field, rolled a short distance, and came to a stop.
We looked at each other and confirmed that neither of us was hurt and that the was no sign of a fire anywhere. So we opened the door (a Mooney has only one cockpit door, on the right side) and got out. Then we looked at each other again and burst out laughing. We were in the middle of a huge green alfalfa field with no one and no structures anywhere in sight.
What do we do now? “Call 911,” I said, and pulled up my phone.
“No!” Eliot said.
“Why not?” I asked.
“You tell him we’ve been involved in a plane crash and they will go berserk. There will be be fire engines and police and everybody all over the place.”
“Well, okay,” I said and put my phone up. We waited for 15 or 20 minutes, but there was still no sign of life, although we could see a road a mile or so to the south with some traffic on it.The likelihood that we get attracted by his attention was low
Finally, I said, “I really think we need to call somebody.”
“Okay, Eliot said, “But don't say it was a plane crash.”
I found the nonemergency number for the Holt County Sheriff's Department and called it. I told the dispatcher what it happened, and she said, “What do you want me to do about it?”
That response sort of stunned me. So then I said, “Ma'am, we been in a plane crash. Nobody is hurt, but we need someone to come out here and help us.”
“Okay,” she said, and somewhat grudgingly gave me a number for the O'Neill airport. I called it, and got a recorded message that it was disconnected. Shortly after that we saw the sheriff's car go by on the road. He might have been looking for us, but he didn't even slow down. Sometime after that a pickup truck came bouncing to the field with the driver accompanied by an 11-year-old boy. The driver was the chief or assistant-chief of the local volunteer fire department. His truck had a radio, and before long the entire town of O'Neill had turned out. One of the members of the audience was a flight instructor. He was of the view that we should fly it out. I said “We’re not flying this airplane anywhere when it engine just quit. You can fly it out if you want.” More sensible schemes prevailed. In the considerable period of time we had been waiting, we had ascertained that the airplane was not damaged in any apparent way.
So the townspeople got someone to bring a tractor. We pulled Speedbrakes by hand to the edge of the alfalfa field, to an adjacent farm road, hooked up the tractor and proceeded to pull the airplane on the state and county roads to the airport. It was rather like a parade. All the residents came out and lined the road to watch. A sheriff's deputy led the profession in his squad car, and the Nebraska State Patrol and the O'Neill town police blocked the intersection for passage.
Once the airplane was in the hangar, the mechanic opened up the engine, with us watching, and checked out the electrical and fuel systems. Everything was fine. There was a good fuel flow. The gas tanks were full. He started it up, and the engine ran fine.
We surely were not going to fly it again until we found that what was wrong with it, so we began to consider how we were going to get back to Chicago. Eliot was scheduled to fly his news helicopter the next day, Monday. O’Neill does not have a rental car outlet or a taxi cab service. The airport proprietor said, “Why don’t you just take the courtesy car?”
“All the way to Chicago?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said. “I have your airplane as security.”
So Eliot and I set out on the 11-hour drive back to Chicago, deciding to stop at a motel in Des Moines at 1 AM for some rest.
We kept in close touch with the O'Neill mechanic. He reported that he couldn't find anything obvious that was wrong, but he had cleaned and readjusted everything. After about three weeks, we drove back to O’Neill to pick up Speedbrakes. This time we planned for an overnight stay on the trip.
We ran up the engine on the ground at different throttle and mixture settings, and after all that went fine, we took off. We circled up directly over the airport and did some more maneuvers at different engine settings and mixture settings. At some point in these tests we detected some roughness, and went back to the hangar. The mechanic had left one of the spark plug wires loose. He secured it, and we resumed our tests. After about 30 minutes Eliot I looked at each other and said, “Well, ready to head for Chicago?” We agreed that everything seemed to be fine with Speedbrakes, we leveled off--we already were it 6,000 or 7,000 feet--and turned eastward. The engine immediately started bucking and coughing. Eliot made an immediate 180 and we headed back to the airport, certain this time that we had plenty of altitude to make it back. We landed without incident. We left Speedbrakes in the hanger and once again drove back to Chicago in the courtesy car.
This time, we told the mechanic to start replacing stuff, starting with both fuel pumps. When he sent the engine-driven pump back to the factory as a tradein, the factory reported that an internal gasket had come loose and was bouncing around inside the chamber periodically occluding the output port. Now, at last, we had a smoking gun explaining the engine failures. After the mechanic reported that the pumps had been replaced and that Speedbrakes had passed its ground run ups, we went back to O'Neill.
This time we flew back to Chicagoland, Speedbrakes’ new home base: Lake in the Hills airport, about 25 miles north of Chicago.
Both Eliot and I knew that we needed to build time in Speedbrakes before we were completely comfortable with it. So we regularly went out to Like in The Hills and flew to some other airport, shot touch-and-go landings and practiced proficiency maneuvers along the way.
We briefed every takeoff carefully, making sure we knew where we would land if the engine quit at specific points on the departure path. About six weeks after we got the airplane back from Nebraska we were out practicing and flew to the Dekalb County Airport to practice takeoffs and landings. Conditions were right for a long straight-in approach. I announced my intentions on CTAF, flattened the prop pitch, enriched the mixer and reduced power to the approach configuration. The engine quit. Then, as Eliot jockeyed the throttle and mixture, controls it caught a few times. By the time I was on short final approach, however, the engine was dead.
It was weird seeing the prop stationary in front of me as I touched down. But I must say I flew about as perfect an approach as I have ever flown. We touched down about a third of the way down the runway and, with Eliot cautioning me not to apply the brakes, used our momentum to coast off onto a taxiway. We decided to try starting the engine. It started right up. So we taxied into the fixed base operation, went inside and told the folks about our third engine failure in as many months. We asked the manager and the mechanic to do an annual inspection and also to concentrate on whatever might be causing the problem. The manager gave us a ride back to Lake in the Hills in his Cessna so we could recover my car.
Eliot and I had made it clear that we wanted to participate in the annual inspection, and so we spent many days at the airport working alongside the mechanic and doing a deep clean of Speedbrakes while we were at it – such things as removing dirt and grime from under the seats, and repairing some wiring that mice had chewed underneath the side panels. Eventually Speedbrakes was ready. We did a test flight and then flew it back to Lake in the Hills.
We continued to put in flight time on Speedbrakes, sometimes together, and often separately. Eliot flew his fiancé to Decatur, Illinois near where he grew up for a weekend. When he got ready to return and did the engine run up before takeoff, the engine ran rough, and the roughness got worse when he increased the throttle. He taxied back and put Speedbrakes into yet another shop. It turned out the engine had blown a valve.
The next time we got together, Eliot said, “I want to sell it. I don't feel comfortable in it anymore, and you shouldn't either. We got it to be an IFR airplane, but anyone would have to be nuts to fly that airplane in instrument conditions, thinking the engine might stop at any moment.” We had some further discussion around alternatives such as my keeping it and buying out his interest, but in the end I concluded that his instincts were right. We put Speedbrakes on the market, and eventually sold it for about $10,000 less than we paid for it.
We did, of course, disclose the various problems we had had to the purchaser; they were in the airframe and engine logbooks, anyway, for anybody to see.
At dinner one night in August, 2013, Eliot and I got to talking about why Chicago did not have a downtown heliport. “Hell!” we said to each other, “Why don’t we establish one?” I went home and did some research on Chicago and Cook County land use law. There seem to be no obvious legal impediments, beyond the expected requirement to get various permits, so Eliot and I began to talk about setting up a company to establish a heliport. In the course of doing that we discovered that a retired Marine Colonel, Mike Conklin, who had been one of Bill Clinton's Marine One pilots had raised capital and organize an enterprise with some backers of Mayor Rahm Emanuel to build what he called a “Vertiport” on land belonging to the State of Illinois on the West Side. I had meetings with Conklin, and so did Eliot.
At one point Eliot and Alan Muir, the proprietor of AM Air Service, for whom Eliot occasionally flew as a pilot, discussed with Conklin the possibility that AM Air Service would operate the Vertiport under contract with the Conklin’s enterprise. Eliot and I worked up business plans for presentation to Conklin. I was very much a silent contributor to all this, merely helping Eliot prepare spreadsheets and narratives to support the proposals.
Meanwhile we discovered that a young man by the name of Trevor Heffernan was pushing a competing heliport proposal. After some difficulty, I found contact information for Trevor and invited him to lunch, in February, 2014. He told me that he had tried to work with the Conklin on the Vertiport proposal but found Conklin impossible to work with because of his arrogance and his unwillingness to take Trevor seriously. Trevor was only 28. So Trevor said, “Screw you; I'll do it myself.” Trevor had already done an extremely good job of making submissions to the city and county agencies and had assembled a highly credible team of urban planners and aviation safety experts.
I got hold of Scott Waguespack, my former student, assistant campaign manager, and good friend, who was now a second term Chicago alderman. I asked Scott to meet with Trevor and me to see how he could facilitate movement of Trevor's proposal through the various municipal agencies. We met on March 11, 2014. At the time, I was neutral as between the two proposals. If one heliport was good to Chicago, two were twice as good. But then, the Conklin started a scurrilous campaign against Trevor's proposal, stuffing mailboxes in the relevant wards with flyers questioning helicopter safety and protesting against the noise impact.
I thought this was beyond the pale, especially since any helicopter operation (including Conklin’s) was going to make noise and be subject to safety accusations. I told Trevor the because of this smear campaign. I now fully supported his proposal, and was prepared to testify before the City Council in support of it.
The Chicago City Council held hearings. Trevor did a masterful job of assembling witnesses in favor of his proposal, ranging from the urban planners and safety experts to black pastors from the affected neighborhoods. I presented well-crafted testimony myself, emphasizing the economic benefits, the safety of the proposal, and the fact that it was a reality, unlike the competing proposal (Conklin’s) which still was “pretty much a fantasy,” I said.
As I left the witness stand I passed within a few feet of Conklin, who was sitting in the audience, glaring at me.
Trevor got his approvals, built his heliport, and begin flying about six months later. I would regularly see his helicopters giving tours over Lake Michigan when I was out sailing. I was, of course, invited to every christening party and celebration of milestone achievements for Trevor's operation.
Eliot and I both saw the CBS 60 Minutes television interview with Jeff Bezos, in which he claimed that small drones would soon be delivering Amazon packages. We talked about the possibility, did a little Internet browsing and discovered that we could buy a DJI Phantom, like the one Bezos had shown, for $1,200. I ordered one immediately. After it arrived, I waited to open the box until Eliot could come over, so we could do it together. The temperature then was about 5°F in Chicagoland, and it was after dark by the time Eliot got to my house in Glencoe. We put the props and battery on the drone together, and took it out to a ballfield behind the local elementary school and flew it. It was bitterly cold, but great fun. It also was really dark, which made for some great video of the drone flying around with its flashing lights.
We continued to fly the drone at every opportunity. One one occasion, when we were flying it over Hoffman Estates, near Eliot's apartment, I flew it too far away, lost sufficient visual contact to be able to determine its orientation, and it eventually disappeared. We drove around all over the place trying to find it, but never did.
We were quite excited about the commercial prospects for small drones. So we set up an LLC, Movovolate Aviation, LLC, or Movoaviation, for short, and began to write what became a dozen aviation magazine articles about drones, and a coupel of longer and more serious law review articles. I went to the first drone trade show in Atlanta, and we bought several additional off-the-shelf drones and began to build a larger drone aircraft from a kit. We christened the aircraft the Movonator, and spent many hours assembling it in a corner of Eliot's apartment, which we had set up as a workshop. We got it to fly a few times, but had continual difficulty with its navigation and control systems, necessitating a return of parts to Europe and then a wait of several weeks before they were returned.
Meanwhile we were flying the off-the-shelf drones regularly and developing commercial proposals for potential customers. The most serious of these was a proposal for Channel 7 news, one of Eliot’s news helicopter customers. The technical director requested that we prepare such a proposal to do ad hoc drone coverage for the station, but apparently the station’s New York lawyers – it was a network-owned station – were unwilling to incur what they believed were risks of liability.
During this period, we also wrote a 22-page comment to the FAA to be a part of its notice and comment rulemaking on general small drone rules. The regulatory approach that we urged on the FAA was the same as the approach that I was advocating in what became five law review articles on drone regulation, three co-authored with Eliot, and two with my research assistant, Albert Plawinsky. Regulation should be risk-based, and not overreact to fantasy scenarios about drone accidents. They should be performance-based, allowing engineers and manufacturers leeway to decide how they wanted to meet performance requirements, rather than having the regulations dictate engineering design. And they should not involve preapproval of drone equipment; rather they should be allow drone designers to certify their own compliance with federal requirements, subject to recall if the designs turned out to fall short.
In the FAA's final rule, the agency cited our submission a half-dozen times.
A TV news photographer who had flown with Eliot a number of times was very interested in setting up a drone business and using it in his work. Before the FAA regulation was put, he came to me, and asked if I would represent him in obtaining an exemption from the FAA allowing him to fly. The FAA was using the exemption process to allow small drone operations to begin while it worked on the regulations. I succeeded in getting an exemption, word spread about my availability, and I represented another dozen or so small businessmen, applying for exemptions, and, in a couple of cases, representing them before the FAA and municipal bodies when they got in trouble for flying their drones. I formally contracted with Eliot as a paralegal so that help with these drone applications without compromising lawyer client confidentiality.
The FAA's Flight Standards District Office (“FSDO”) for the Chicago area was a mess. One of its inspectors regularly came to Midwest Helicopter Association meetings which I attended. He was a pompous blowhard, always throwing his weight around, interrupting others, and dogmatically insisting on questionable interpretations of regulations for helicopter flight. As I began to represent small drone operators in Chicagoland, I tangled with this FSDO more than once. Typically, the office would send menacing letters to one of my clients saying, “You have been flying small unmanned aircraft in violation the Federal Aviation Regulations on a number of occasions.” These letters would not specify what regulations had been violated, when the violations took place, or where they took place. When my clients asked for my help with these letters, I would write the FAA and say, “Due process requires you to give notice of the specifics of an alleged violation. We not we cannot prepare a defense based on these vague claims.” In all but one case, that resolved the matter; my clients and I heard nothing further. In one case, however, the FSDO followed up with another threatening letter, saying it was the second notice, but giving no more detail. I found the contact information for the FAA's regional counsel, called her up and sent her a follow-up email saying that the letters did not satisfy due process, and that we were prepared to litigate the matter. She said she would look into it, and I heard nothing further.
On another occasion the Chicago Police cited one of my clients for violating the local drone ordinance. I appeared at the hearing for him, and we worked out a settlement.
The Cook County Park District was considering regulations that would ban small drones from the many forest districts and recreation areas around Chicagoland. I called the lawyer who was working on the regs and met with her. We negotiated some substantial changes that would bring the county regulations more in line with the FAA standards for exemptions and which would permit drone flight under specified circumstances. Paul Meincke, of Chicago’s Channel 7 News, took an interest in this, and I was on television several times in connection with small drones and local efforts to regulate them.
At about the same time, I heard on the radio that my former student, former assistant campaign manager and friend, Alderman Scott Waguespack had cosponsored, along with Alderman Ed Burke the Chairman of the Chicago city Council Finance Committee, later indicted for corruption, had drafted a drone ordinance. According to the radio report, the ordinance amounted nearly to a ban. I called Scott up and offered my services to rewrite the proposed ordinance so that it made more sense. Scott accepted my offer immediately and put me in touch with a staff lawyer for the City Council, who basically worked for Alderman Burke. I knew that were going to be hearings on the proposal, and I anticipated that the anti-drone forces would come out in force. So I worked hard to balance the witness list, getting local drone operators, some national trade group people, the executive director of the Illinois state broadcasters association, and a drone lawyer from the DC area to come to town to testify. To my surprise, the anti-drone forces did not mobilize and my witnesses dominated the record. I basically wrote the ordinance, though it was restyled by the City Council lawyer.
One of the more amusing aspects of the hearing was that all the local media had turned out with their TV cameras. It turned out that Alderman Burke had leaked the idea that he was going to get one of my clients to fly his drone in the City Council room. I thought that was a very bad idea. The TV stations were there, of course, to record it when it crashed into someone or something. I persuaded my client not to agree to do that and told Alderman Burke that I had done so, joking with him a bit and telling him that the ordinance that his he was about to adopt could be the model for the rest of the country.
After we finished the first law review article, I suggested that we write a book about small drones. After some outreach efforts, we signed a publishing contract with Taylor and Francis. The publisher is in some turmoil over reorganizations, but we worked on and delivered a 12 chapter book, Domesticating Drones, which was published in 2015.
Later, after the FAA released its Subpart H drone regulations, I was of the view that Movo Aviation should begin to offer courses for potential drone operators, to help them pass the FAA examination. Eliot was reluctant, and so I decided that good gesture in that direction was to write a small book, priced aggressively, to help people pass the test. I started on it by myself, but in the end enlisted Eliot's help to finalize it. That second book was published in 2016.
Air One was a consortium of northern-Illinois law-enforcement and emergency-response agencies, headquartered in Winthrop Harbor, Illinois. The organization had about five army-surplus helicopters, acquired under the Defense Department surplus disposal initiative. I'd heard of it vaguely through Eliot. When I found its website, I discovered that the organization was planning a fundraiser in Waukegan in a couple weeks. I suggested to Eliot that it would be fun to go and learn more about the organization. I printed out a list of the members of its Board of Directors from the website and put that in my suit jacket pocket before we went. During the reception, I made it a point to meet everyone on the list and to check them off as I did so. One of the early contacts asked, “Why are you interested in Air One?” I blurted out, “I am writing a law review article about it.” Before that moment, I had no plans to write a law review article, but I write lots of them and it was a perfectly plausible answer by a law professor. I made sure to get business cards from everyone I met.
As soon as I got home, I sent emails to to everyone, again mentioning the article, and saying I would like to interview them. Everyone was agreeable to being interviewed. I started with the Joel Brumlik, chief of the Winthrop Harbor Police Department, one of the organizers and branched out to the Commander of Operations of the same department, Mike Bitton. I moved on to Mark Curran, the sheriff of Lake County, with whom I was loosely acquainted because of politics when I ran for Congress, and Bill Prim, the just-elected sheriff of McHenry County.
Next was Dan Bitton, the brother of Mike. Dan had been a bit standoffish at the party but he welcome me warmly when I went to see him in his downtown office, part of the Cook County Department of Homeland Security.
I asked these contacts to help arrange for a visit with the Chicago police helicopter unit, and through one of the firefighters who had trained some people from California, I arranged to fly with the Los Angeles police helicopter unit with the Fontana, California police unit and to meet with the El Monte unit. Those two flights were a blast. In Fontana we got involved in chasing an armed robber from the air, and in Los Angeles, we tracked a residential burglar, and backed up ground units involved in a shooter incident. All of this provided an excellent source of material for the article
I recruited Eliot as a co-author on the article, but was unable to induce him to get much closer than that to Air One. Apparently there was some kind of bad blood between his boss a U.S. helicopter and some of the Air One people – or at least he thoguht that there was. When Eliot’s interest flagged, I recruited my friend, Chris Cue, a Marine captain with combat experience in Afghanistan, as another co-author. The article was published in late 2014 or early 2015.
As I kept in contact with the Air One leadership, their enthusiasm for my involvement grew, and, before long, I was asked if I would join the board and also accept appointment as the Regulatory Compliance Officer for the organization.
Eliot at the time was trying to build time in turbine helicopters to improve his job prospects, and I consistently urged the Air One people to set up a program that would recruit young, low-time, helicopter pilots and get the benefit of their services in exchange for allowing them to build turbine time. Eventually, my arguments were persuasive, and the board adopted a “safety pilot,” program which allowed anyone with a private helicopter certificate or better the fly as a copilot, and eventually upgrade to pilot-in-command after a certain number of hours and successful checkrides. Given that I was trying to arrange this for Eliot, and he was uninterested, it was amusing that I became the first safety pilot.
Among other things, during my service in the Air One board, I went on a training exercise and dangled from the end of a hundred foot line below the helicopter while being transported from a parking lot at the Winthrop Harbor Marina to the beach of Lake Michigan. A deputy sheriff flew with me, so it was relatively safe, but quite exciting. I had recruited my friend Chris Cue to join me. Chris enjoyed the experience as much as I did. Later, I thought about the risks of doing a long-line ride like that that below a single-engine helicopter. The facts are, if the helicopter had an engine failure with a man or men dangling below the helicopter like that, the pilot would have to choose between killing the passenger on the rope by dragging him along the ground or killing himself by deferring autorotation until it was no longer possible. I decided that once was enough for that experience.
I also got about five hours’ time as a pilot in an Air One Huey helicopter, ferrying it from Chicagoland to a maintenance base in Michigan. That was pretty cool as well.
Air One was having some difficulty with the state of Illinois, getting access to emergency state police radio frequencies, and the leadership – not so much the board – decided to reconfigure the organization as a state agency. The old nonprofit and its board were disbanded in 2015, and shortly afterwards the board of the new agency removed the leadership I knew, and the organization became defunct.
