A glimpse into life in the not-so-fast lane
One of my fantasies is to own an airport. Not just a farm strip, but a real airport, where people can fly in for lunch or dinner, watch airplanes come and go, visit with congenial friends, and generally savor life on beautiful summer days as puffy clouds drift along in blue skies. Some people like taverns or baseball stadiums; I like airports.
Lawrence "Squire" Haynes had the dream long before I did, and he did something about it. In 1963 he bulldozed out a 3,500-foot runway on an abandoned strip mine near Rainelle, West Virginia, rolled it hard, and sowed grass. Beside the runway he built a small cinder block restaurant, which is open on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, May through October. There is no gasoline for sale at the field; the nearest airports with fuel are Greenbrier Valley Regional at Lewisburg, 15 miles east, and Beckley, 40 miles west.
At the restaurant beside his mountaintop airfield, Squire plays host with infectious enthusiasm, greeting customers and talking flying, airplanes, and any other subject that comes up. He is a spry, trim 80 years old and has no trouble scrambling up on a wing to look into a cockpit. He has a full head of gray hair, a ready smile, and a firm handshake. One of the reasons he is in such good shape is that he takes care of the airport himself. He mows the runway every other week.
The Rainelle runway is wide and rolls a little, as most grass strips do. "We have the reputation as the best grass strip in the state," Squire bragged to me. "The wind up here can be a little tricky, though." His tanned face lit up in a smile; tricky crosswinds are one of life's good things.
I landed at Rainelle for coffee and blackberry pie on a Sunday in August, which was one of those rare perfect days: scattered clouds with bases around 4,500 feet; almost no wind; visibility 10 miles in haze; temperatures in the 70s; and a soft, gauzy sun that made everything glow. It was a sublime, gentle day, a day made for flying.
A dozen people sat in front of the restaurant, behind three parked airplanes. They had just finished the Sunday buffet. "People drive or fly in to eat and visit and shoot the bull," Haynes said grandly, then undertook to introduce me to everyone.
It is obvious that he has fashioned this place to suit his own personality, yet he didn't set out to be the restaurant host at his own airport — to hear him tell it, it just happened. "I learned to fly on the G.I. Bill in 1947, at a little grass strip near Rainelle. It's been closed for years. The fellow who ran it had Cubs and Aeroncas for the students to fly."
Haynes has spent his life as a private pilot flying for recreation. Since pilots are a fairly rare breed in the Allegheny Mountains, I asked Haynes what he did for a living. "I repaired electronic appliances and climbed poles for a television cable company for over 30 years."
It was the flying that hooked him. From 1960 to 1963, Haynes was the airport manager at Pence Springs, which was the closest airport to Rainelle before Greenbrier Valley Regional at Lewisburg was built. Because of the distance from Rainelle to Pence Springs — 38 miles by road — Haynes and two other airplane owners decided to finance a strip on the Haynes family farm.
Eventually, to attract people to the airport, he built the restaurant. "I'm the only airplane owner left in Rainelle," Haynes told me. "The others are all dead or have moved away. I'm the last one."
"So what's going to happen to general aviation?" I asked.
"I see that the new Cessna 172s are going to cost $140,000. That's way out of the price range of most people. I've got a 1958 172, and it will do me," said Haynes.
This is the second 1958 Skyhawk that he has owned. Did he just like the vintage? "I liked the price," he said tartly.
After I finished my pie, we went outside. A binder of Haynes' photographs of the people and airplanes that have visited this summer was making the rounds. Everyone oohed and aahed over a Van's RV-4 that a fellow in Beckley had labored four years to build, admired vintage airplanes, and called out the names of friends from other places that they recognized.
"The hottest airplane we ever had land here was a P-51 Mustang," Haynes told me. "Boy, that was a day."
About that time a Cessna swooped in, taxied over, and shut down. One of the passengers was Pearl Laskin, from Hinton, West Virginia, who may have been the very first woman to fly to Alaska. She did it in June 1946 in a Piper Cub Coupe, a 50-horsepower popper that Ms. Laskin said "loved the ground." She is one of the oldest women still flying, although I couldn't bring myself to ask just exactly how old that was. Suffice it to say that she moves with vigor and grace and has a ready smile and sharp, intelligent eyes.
Squire's competition for the fly-and-eat trade are the myriad pancake breakfasts, corn roasts, and crab dinners scheduled every summer and early fall weekend at small airports all over the land. I go to these food soirees as often as my schedule and the weather permit. I stroll around, admiring the fun flying machines, airplanes affordable by folks who aren't professional athletes, airplanes without gizmos that require a computer genius to program. Clean, polished old Cessnas, Pipers, Luscombes, and Aeroncas are works of art to me, so I like to hang out where I can see and touch them.
Still, airplanes are just hardware. It is the people who fly them that make aviation a passion, people like Squire Haynes and Pearl Laskin, unique human beings with unique stories that I run into at every airport, everywhere that flying is on the menu.
I confess, I like people who carefully study the sky. I like people who think that an airplane is something to be flown, not polished. I like people who, when they see blue sky, think of flying, not mowing the lawn. I like people who think that flying there is at least half the fun. I like people who give airplane rides to kids. I like people who understand that, like all worthwhile things, aviation is something that must be invested in. I like people who look up when they hear an airplane in the sky.
Maybe someday my wife, Deborah, and I will own an airport with a little restaurant and a small hangar. In my dream I see a Super Cub to give rides to kids and grandmothers and tow sailplanes aloft. People will come from all over to joyride and soar in the thermals and sit in the sun on the benches out front. Deb and I will grow old together watching airplanes, listening for the telltale murmur of engines, talking of people we know and places we've been and summer skies that we can't forget.
Until that happy day we'll probably just eat pie and drink coffee on Squire's mountaintop, watching clouds drift along and waiting to see who drops in. Who knows, someday that P-51 might return.
When I took off, Squire had his video camera pointed in my direction. The last time we were in Rainelle he had just purchased the thing at a yard sale and, since the owner's manual was long gone, was soliciting advice on how to operate it.
"I want to capture the good times," he told one fellow as they discussed the ins and outs of the various buttons. "Get them on film so that I can watch them this winter. Summers are too short."
Stephen Coonts, AOPA 1056593, owns a Cessna 182, a 1942 Stearman, and a Breezy. A former naval aviator, he is the author of six best-selling novels and a nonfiction work about flying his Stearman, The Cannibal Queen. His latest book is War in the Air, a collection of true flying stories.
Squire Haines welcomes fly-in visitors at his Rainelle Airport (9W4), located about 4.5 nm on the 114-degree radial of the Rainelle VOR in southeastern West Virginia. Runway 17/35 is 3,446 feet of turf in excellent condition at 3,380 feet msl. The unicom, 122.9 MHz, is not always monitored. The restaurant is open from 9 a.m. until 8 p.m. on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays from May through October; telephone 304/438-9268.
