Alligators, Freight Trains & Near Flying Disasters

About the Book

Down through the years with my unusual amount of engine failures, over 18, most pilots with total engine failures usually died.  Also, how many 16 year old teenagers have thumbed and hopped the freight trains to see the states from coast to coast and border to border, starting with a twenty dollar bill?  Not only is this an interesting, fun read, but it has some simple rules that help to keep pilots in general aviation alive, even the best.  Before retiring from the airline, I met a flight instructor that had instructed at the same airport in Monroeville years before.  He was an excellent pilot.  He told me he was ferrying airplanes all over the world, even single engine aircraft.  I was amazed that he would fly over the ocean to reach some of the countries with a single engine airplane.  The last thing I asked him, “What will you do if the engine quits?”  He just laughed.  A few years later his picture was on the front page of a Pittsburgh newspaper.  He was flying near the Canary Islands and his engine quit.  They never found him.  So, if you have any pilot friends, you may want to give them a copy of this book if only to read the chapter on, “Staying Alive”.

About the Author

This very day it just came to me, all my life I was a spontaneous guy!   When I was about 14, in Turtle Creek, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Pittsburgh, my buddy and I were out riding our old balloon tire bikes and we were going no where in particular and we found ourselves riding through downtown Pittsburgh and we just kept pedaling and found ourselves in Weirton, West Virginia at about 2 pm in the afternoon, hungry and sixty cents between us!  Another time stationed at Kessler AFB, Mississippi, we had nothing to do for the weekend, and I grabbed my high powered Enfield rifle from my wall-locker and said to my buddy Vic, “Let’s go alligator hunting”.  We did.  In Japan at Tachikawa AFB we had been looking at Mt. Fuji, miles away for months.  I said, “Let’s climb it”.  We did.  Was 14 years old, 5 feet tall, 100 pounds, the girls were bigger and stronger than me, they ‘kicked sand in my face’.  My father showed me how to use his weights and I took the worlds record in the bench press.  While there at the competitions, my son Regan and I thought there must be a better squat rack than what they used, so we invented the Monolift Squat Rack, now used around the world in world power lifting competition.  As a pilot had over 18 engine failures, ‘went down’ many times and even had double engine failures as an airline captain on a major airline. Once at night, in a blizzard over Cleveland, had both engines fail and had about a zero chance of survival.  We survived.  I finally reached that point in my life that I had more action than I wanted!