Mr. Piper

The bright yellow Piper Cub circled Outlaw Field, in Clarksville, Tennessee, and entered the downwind leg of the traffic pattern to start its approach. m I continued to wash the wing of the Piper Cruiser by the hangar. It was a summer afternoon in 1946 and I was 16 years old, earning flight time by washing and cranking airplanes and doing the other odd jobs around the airport. There were a lot of brand-new Cubs being ferried from Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, in those days. The postwar aviation boom seemed to be building as predicted. Veterans all over the country were learning to fly under the GI Bill, and new private airplanes were being sold to fill the vacuum of several years of exclusive military manufacturing.

The Cub was now on final approach and about to touch down. I stopped washing and, from my vantage point on the ladder, watched the landing with the critical eyes of a veteran pilot with 20 hours' solo time. (Watching airplanes take off and land was always a pleasant means of interrupting airplane-washing duties.)

Not a bad landing.

I clambered down from the ladder and prepared to lure the Cub to the gas pit. But the airplane wheeled around and parked on the flight line, ignoring the hard sell.

A stocky, craggy-faced, gray-haired man in a slightly baggy suit climbed out briskly for his apparent age and asked the whereabouts of the restroom, to which query I gave fairly accurate directions, and he moved off. He certainly looked familiar, somehow...in fact, he looked a great deal like pictures of W.T. Piper of Piper Aircraft. But Mr. Piper, being the president of a large corporation, would at least have a fast airplane and a personal pilot. It was almost uncanny, though, that resemblance — but no corporation president in my imagination would be caught flying an 80-mph Cub from Pennsylvania to Tennessee or beyond. I shook my head and returned to the top of the ladder to resume washing the Cruiser.

Soon he returned and headed for his airplane. I started down again to give him a crank, but he waved me away and, standing behind the propeller, gave it a few quick snaps. As the engine started he swung quickly into the cabin and taxied for takeoff. The airplane lifted from the grass strip, and as it disappeared to the southwest, one of the flight instructors walked up and asked, "Do you know who that was?"

Before I could answer he continued, "That was the old man himself, Bill Piper. I've seen him plenty of times when I went to the factory to pick up a plane."

I admitted that while he did look like the president of Piper Aircraft, surely W.T. Piper wouldn't be ferrying a Cub; he didn't have to do that kind of work, and at his age he should be back at Lock Haven, sitting at a big desk, doing whatever an aircraft corporation president does. (It was a little vague to me as to exactly what the president's duties were, but I felt it included many telephones and much shouting of orders to increase or decrease production.) The instructor told Bill Piper's story, one now known well to those who flew the "little planes." I laid down my washing brush to listen.

Bill Piper started in aviation at the age of 50. He was a Bradford, Pennsylvania, oil man who got interested in the Taylor Brothers Aircraft Corporation when it moved to Bradford in the late 1920s, and by 1930 he was right in the thick of it.

A new word in the American language was soon coined: Cub. There isn't an adult in the United States (or most other countries) who doesn't immediately conceive a picture of a small yellow airplane sitting on a small grass airstrip. In fact, to most nonflyers, any light airplane — and some not-so-light airplanes — is a Cub.

The majority of training airplanes of that era had much more powerful engines, and such a low-powered aircraft was not immediately accepted by "operators." For one thing, in those days flying was supposed to require a great deal of skill; this was the period when the airman was set apart from other citizens. However, flight schools soon found that low purchase price, low operating costs, and low accident rates were beginning to result in profits. The output held firm and then started to climb. By 1934, 70 Cubs were built. This was in the middle of the Depression.

The oil business was left in the background, and in 1937, after a disastrous fire at the Bradford plant, Taylor Aircraft moved to Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, and became Piper Aircraft Corporation.

Years passed after my first seeing Mr. Piper and, being in aviation, I kept up with him through trade magazines. The postwar aviation boom did not last as he had hoped. It had been a false start caused by one large group of veterans learning to fly under the GI Bill. When this training diminished, flight schools were left with airplanes and no students and the manufacturers were left with hundreds of airplanes that they couldn't sell. The bubble burst.

The aviation depression of 1947 to '48 left Piper on shaky ground for a while (many aircraft companies folded during that period), but Mr. Piper kept selling aviation at the grassroots level and slowly won his battle to keep going.

I went to work for Piper Aircraft in 1960 after a few diversions such as college, a stint as a Navy fighter pilot, instructing, and corporate flying. Mr. Piper had not changed in the interim. He was the type of corporation president who ferried airplanes and didn't particularly care to be a clotheshorse. His office door was always open — when he was there. He still believed in getting out in the field and seeing what was actually going on at small airports.

One of my jobs was to occasionally fly him to meetings in a company Aztec (considerably more sophisticated than the Cub). He was 79 years old — and still not settled to the idea of having been grounded two years earlier by his sons Bill Jr., Thomas, and Howard. He figured that he was just getting a good start in the flying game, having gotten his multiengine rating at the age of 74. But his eyes weren't getting any better and, as one of his sons put it, "Dad, wouldn't it be a hell of an advertisement for flying if you flew into something?" He acquiesced but didn't like being put into the passenger category. His mind however, was still as sharp as that of a 20-year-old.

I found out how good his mind was after starting these trips. I prided myself, after much practice, on mentally working estimated times of arrival and other navigation problems, rather than using a computer. One day when we were returning to Lock Haven from Norfolk, Virginia, he asked our groundspeed. Here was a chance to show my mental dexterity. I quickly came up with an answer of "186 miles per hour." He sat for a minute and then said, "I may be wrong, but I get 194."

To humor the old gentleman I got out a computer to show him just why the answer was 186. As I set up the computer, my lecture went about like this: "Well, we were over Washington at three minutes past the hour and it's now 20 minutes after at this checkpoint, so the answer on the computer is, uh...(gulp) 194." He nodded and started dozing again while I muttered to myself and rotated the computer again with the same results: 194.

I had made the mistake that other people had made: just because he appeared to be dozing, it didn't mean that he wasn't aware of what was going on.

On another occasion he had to be in Washington, D.C., at a certain time and the weather was marginal, even for instrument flying. I was hesitant to fly instruments into a congested area such as Washington without a copilot to help with navigation, voice reports, etc., but he said, "I'll act as copilot," and we departed. While I sweated with flying the airplane and following air traffic control instructions, my copilot dozed quietly in the right seat. I had the passing thought of waking him and ordering him to work, but he outranked me and he looked too comfortable. He roused just as we approached Washington, which had suddenly broken out with almost clear skies and good visibility. As we landed he said with a twinkle in his eye, "I thought you were doing all right, so I caught a quick nap to refresh me before we got into the congested Washington area where I'd have to get to work."

On one of our trips I asked him if he remembered landing at Outlaw Field and the skinny kid who offered to prop his Cub.

He said "no."

For years he had a personal project — convincing small communities that they would profit by having short grass strips nearby. These airstrips, called air parks, would be unattended and maintained by the city or county. He traveled thousands of miles each year, making speeches to civic and aviation organizations, advocating such strips as community projects. Funds spent for one large airport such as the then-new Dulles International Airport near Washington, D.C., would pay for hundreds of community airstrips; but, he always added, the airstrips should not be paid for with federal aid but with community funds. He deplored the attitude that federal aid is looked upon as the answer to all problems. He feared that people in this country were becoming too dependent on the government for benefits and that the entrepreneur would soon vanish from the American scene. (He had served in the Army during the Spanish-American War and World War I and jokingly said that he hadn't gotten any pensions yet.)

In the fall of 1962, I was assigned as his assistant on the air park program and found out just how much energy he had. The rounds of meetings, conventions, and conferences soon had me falling behind and panting. It was almost impossible for him to get across a crowded convention hall after a meeting — there were too many people who wanted to shake his hand and speak to him. And he was never too busy to talk about the air park program, to one person or 200 people. His features lit up as he talked about it:

"The airport is the foundation of aviation, just as the road is the foundation of the automotive industry.

"You must have someplace to land.

"One airport in the world would be useless. The greater the number of airports, the greater the value of the individual airport."

To travel with him was an experience. Mr. Piper's friends in aviation numbered in the thousands; and when he walked into an airport terminal building, he was apt to be greeted by airline pilots, corporate pilots, student pilots, old-timers, and new people in aviation who had only read about him. He always had time to talk about flying to anyone, and the old-timers reminiscing about the old days found his memory phenomenal.

When he was introduced at aviation meetings, he was usually given a standing ovation by pilots who recognized what he had done for private flying. Najeeb E. Halaby, head of the Federal Aviation Agency, interrupted a busy schedule and personally drove Mr. Piper to National Airport after they had a meeting in Washington.

In 1961, the National Business Aircraft Association (now known as the National Business Aviation Association), an organization of corporate pilots, called him a "practical idealist" and voted him an award for "Meritorious Service to Aviation" that read: "In recognition of his vision and determination which have brought the realm of flight to untold thousands of pilots and passengers the world over.

"And in tribute to his dynamic leadership of Piper Aircraft Corporation — producers of more civil aircraft than any other airframe manufacturer in the world."

During the presentation, the master of ceremonies asked pilots who had flown Piper airplanes to stand. In the crowded hall only a very few were left seated.

In addition to numerous awards given by aviation groups he was given honorary degrees of doctor of humanities from Lycoming College in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, and a doctor of law from Alderson-Broaddus College in Phillipi, West Virginia. (He graduated from Harvard in 1903 with a degree in engineering — a spread of almost 60 years between these degrees.)

He enjoyed using his mind more than any person I ever knew. When we were waiting for taxis or at other comparatively quiet times he was apt to compute the actual volume of space taken up by the present population on earth (about one cubic mile, assuming 40 cubic feet per person) or some other similar problem.

One night after a strenuous meeting in Pittsburgh, he wondered idly what was the volume of the earth. (There had been something in the newspaper that had brought this to mind.) Soon I had forgotten my fatigue as I got caught up in his computations. We were comparing the difference between the volume of a sphere and a cube having sides of the same dimension as the diameter of sphere. He had a hearty appetite for learning and I learned from him.

During another of these comparatively quiet periods we started talking about astronomy, as I mentioned that I had been looking through my telescope the night before. He became thoughtful and said, "You know, people get to thinking that each of us is mighty important, but when you look at space and realize that there may be a million planets with life like ours you stop thinking that we're the center of it all."

Another time he said, "A person must do the best he can while he's here." He was not a particularly religious man in terms of organized religion, but he lived each day as it came.

He walked a great deal and scorned the trend of driving everywhere, no matter how close. Lock Haven residents were accustomed to seeing him walking many blocks to pick up groceries downtown. He once said to me, "Bill, you ought to walk; it's good for you."

I answered lightly that I wasn't in as good a shape as he was (there was almost 50 years difference in our ages) and, besides, he didn't have to answer to anyone if he were late.

"Start earlier," he retorted. But I was of the new soft generation and still drove when going more than half a block. He once mentioned that while walking downtown on a particularly fine day he had an almost irresistible urge to break into a run (this was when he was only age 79 or 80) but had curbed it because he thought a man his age should not be seen running down a city sidewalk. He looked definitely regretful as he told of his victorious fight against temptation.

I found that his outlook on life was best summed up by a project he started at the age of 77: a 20-year soil rebuilding plan for his garden. And, knowing him, I would say that by the time that project was completed, he would have had another long-term project set up. He was a true argument against a set age for retirement.

And he certainly did not think of retiring, although a great deal of the physical running of the company was now being done by his sons. As an example, they were considering manufacturing an inexpensive two-place trainer, and the younger hands thought that this would be "regressing to the Cub days." He reared back and said that there was still a place for such an airplane — the average man should have a chance to fly, even in the space age. The Colt was the result, and production had to be tripled within three months.

Public acceptance of the private airplane for transportation was his dream.

In addition to Piper Aircraft, the air park program, his garden, and numerous civic responsibilities, he decided on something new to keep his mind active. At the age of 80, he started studying Spanish in his spare time. Why Spanish? Well, he always had been interested in learning Spanish — and after all, he said, this was as good a time as any, right?

He died on January 15, 1970, at the age of 89. It was said that he died of natural causes, but I know that the downhill passage of his health started when two outside companies started fighting over Piper stock and control of the company. Those companies were only interested in making profits and didn't care about flying or making airplanes (if more profits could be made by shuffling stock or making girdles, they'd do it). The Piper family loved building airplanes, not making a lot of money, and it's a good theory that when the company he and his sons and others had built started passing out of their hands, he died of a broken heart — no matter what the medical people said.