Pilots

Bill Morris seems restless, but this is nothing new. A restlessness born of curiosity, intellect, and an adventuresome spirit has defined Morris' life.

He is an inventor — of super-sensitive temperature measurement and control equipment and marine sanitation devices, among other widgets for industrial and personal use. He is a mariner, having built a couple of marinas, owned several boats, and sailed from the Chesapeake to the Bahamas 28 times. And for the past 56 years, he has been flying. Not surprisingly, he goes about it a little differently, a little more energetically than most of the rest of us. When he takes off in his Cessna 182, it is on a long-distance flight to tour Europe or hopscotch down the Caribbean chain of islands or check out some remote corner of the world. Last summer, he and a friend, David F. Rogers, made a round-trip flight to Point Barrow, Alaska. "I'm not interested in flying around the airport," he says with considerable understatement.

Inspired by Lindbergh's 1927 flight from New York to Paris, Morris finally learned to fly in 1938 at age 30. Later that same year, he spent $950 on his first airplane, an Aeronca. Morris rented a farmer's field a half-mile from his Silver Spring, Maryland, home and cleared it for a landing strip.

In 1940, he embarked on his first flying adventure. Gulf Oil Company was sponsoring a Washington, D.C.-to-Miami lightplane rally — free fuel along the way — and Morris convinced his wife, Lil, that they ought to join in the fun. The fun part came later in the trip, however; they departed snowy College Park, Maryland, two days before Christmas, having left all warm clothes behind because of the Aeronca's space and weight restrictions. Morris had planned to fly with a group of other airplanes, but the gaggle soon disappeared in the murk. Road maps, railroad tracks, and determination saw Morris and his wife complete the three-day flight to south Florida.

At the outbreak of World War II, Morris was working as a designer for an instrumentation company. He remained a civilian to continue his experiments at the company, where he developed a relatively simple, low- cost method to conduct extreme low temperature tests of devices for use on high-altitude aircraft. He also joined the Civil Air Patrol and flew a depth-charge-equipped Stinson on ship-spotting missions out of Atlantic City, New Jersey.

Meanwhile, the profitable sale of his first house kindled a new interest for Morris: real estate. He built and sold a house on an adjoining lot and later quit his job at the instrument company to devote full-time to real estate ventures. In 1945, he bought land on Kent Island in the Chesapeake for a fly-in summer home for his family. Morris cleared an airstrip on the property and began selling lots along the south side of the strip. Today, Kentmorr still operates as a privately owned residential airpark that welcomes visitors. You can taxi to the west end of the 2,000- foot grass strip, park, and walk a few hundred yards to a meal of steamed blue crabs at a Chesapeake shore restaurant-marina Morris built and later sold.

Morris still lives in the modest bungalow-above-a-hangar he built on the strip. He also bought another parcel to the north and built Bay Bridge Airport and an adjacent marina. This is where he docks Matador, his 42-foot diesel-powered Bahamas cruiser, the latest in a line of Morris Matador family yachts.

He has owned eight airplanes — that first Aeronca, followed by an Aeronca Chief, a Taylorcraft, a Monocoupe, a Stinson 108, a Cessna 170, a Cessna 182 he bought new in 1966, and in 1973 another new Skylane. Twenty years and 2,000 flying hours later, he still has it.

Morris's long-distance flying began after he bought the first Skylane. In 1970, he flew to Iceland and since then has made seven trips to Alaska, two transatlantic round-trip crossings, and four flights north of the Arctic Circle and has landed in every state except Hawaii and in every Canadian province. He also has ventured to the Caribbean and to the Venezuelan coast but much prefers more northerly adventures, if only for the relative lack of bureaucratic and monetary (read: fees) hassles.

Morris always travels with a friend. His wife, who died in 1993, went on some trips, but the longer ones were flown with like-minded adventurers. The Skylane is equipped with a 25-gallon auxiliary tank, for a total capacity of 109 gallons or 10 hours' endurance at the 47-percent power setting he prefers. He uses Mobil 1 synthetic oil, which he changes when it starts to discolor. (It has been 135 hours since the last oil change.) To navigate, he relies on conventional VOR radios, plus GPS, loran, and ADF. The Skylane has a standby vacuum system, hand-held radio, and emergency battery power for selected avionics. He wears survival suits on overwater legs and carries appropriate survival gear.

When Morris bought the airplane, he immediately had a Robertson STOL kit — wing fences and drooping ailerons — installed. Morris isn't as interested in operating out of short strips as he is in being able to land as slowly as possible in inhospitable territory — a forest canopy or mountainside — in the event of a serious in-flight emergency. He attributes a nearly flawless mechanical record to his being "extra fussy about the little things" before departing.

Asked why he enjoys faraway flying, Morris offers a simple explanation: "I just like to go places that aren't jammed up with tourists." Even now, at age 86, he has a chart of the northern half of earth spread out across his dining room table to plot a leisurely summer flight — to Scandinavia.