When it comes to flying, Johnson says, the rules and equipment have changed in the last 52 years, but the basic skills are still the same. When Johnson learned to fly and began to teach, there were no radios, lights, or brakes in the airplanes she used. And you didn't need a special endorsement to fly taildraggers-they were the only airplanes around. Navigation was performed mainly by pilotage and dead reckoning, and most runways were grass.
While that may sound romantic to many modern pilots, Johnson is quick to point out that the past half-century has brought plenty of worthwhile advances to flying. The switch to tricycle gear, for instance, has made flying accessible, she says. "People are less nervous because they are not as apt to ground loop with tricycle gear as with a taildragger." Navigational advances have helped, too. GPS may be the latest technological step forward, but the advent of VORs dramatically improved pilots' ability to get where they were going, especially in instrument meteorological conditions.
Facilities have changed as well. "The airports are better," Johnson says. "You don't do much landing any more on grass fields. Of course, most of those are private." Johnson manages the airport where she is based and says she has been amazed by the progress she's seen since she took the post in 1953. For her first five years as manager, Moore-Murrell Field in Morristown, Tennessee, was a short grass strip. Today it is home to a paved 5,700-foot runway.
As for flight instructing, Johnson admits that there is much more to it now than when she started teaching. "[When I started teaching,] all they had to learn before solo was what a stall was and how to land," Johnson says. "But now there is a lot more to it than that, and it takes longer." In fact, when Johnson started teaching, students commonly soloed in eight hours. "Very few people solo in eight hours nowadays because there's too much to learn," she says.
But while students have much more to learn before they can take an airplane around the pattern by themselves, Johnson believes that some important things are left out of modern training. "We had to learn about spins. We did spins on our flight test," she says of her generation of pilots. Johnson has her own ideas about why spins are no longer a mandatory part of private pilot training. "Spins scare a lot of people. That's probably why," she says.
The total number of hours required to earn a private pilot certificate has stood at 40 since Johnson began instructing, although some of the other time requirements have changed. Fifty years ago, students were required to have a minimum of 20 hours of dual instruction and 20 hours of solo time. Today, they must have a minimum of 20 hours of dual instruction, 10 hours of solo time, and the remaining 10 hours can be either dual or solo. But, Johnson says, it has never been easy to earn a certificate with the minimum number of hours. Johnson doesn't know how many hours she had accumulated when she got her certificate, but she won't forget her solo. "Just the second I had eight hours, that instructor got out," she says. "Now let me tell you, my students are going to know more than that before I get out. Nothing went wrong so I got along alright, but suppose something had gone wrong? I shudder to think what might have happened."
While Johnson prefers the way solos are handled today, she'd like to see cross-country requirements go back to the way they were when she started flying. "The cross-country they have to do now-really, honestly it shocks me," she says. When Johnson started instructing, private pilots were required to have 10 hours of solo cross-country time, including one cross-country of at least 300 miles. In fact, those requirements remained until the last few years when the regulations were changed to require five hours of solo cross-country time and a "long" cross-country flight of 150 miles. "Now that's not much more than getting out of your own back yard. It really isn't, and that bothers me," Johnson says. "I see problems in [students'] cross-country a lot."
The lack of cross-country experience combined with modern pilots' reliance on navigational wizardry means that many pilots are ill-equipped to handle problems that might arise, Johnson believes. She tells the story of a local pilot whose radios malfunctioned within 55 miles of his home airport. Although he recognized where he was the moment the radios went out, he had left his charts in the back seat and soon lost his way. The pilot ended up traveling well over 100 miles, by chance finding and landing at a field some 75 miles north of his intended destination. Johnson is requiring the pilot to take more dual map instruction before she'll rent him another one of her airplanes.
New technologies seem to be stealing from the basic navigation skills of today's pilots, according to Johnson's tough standards. "It used to be we had nothing but maps to navigate by," Johnson says. "The other day I got in with a boy in a Cessna and he reached up and turned on the GPS. I said, 'No, let's turn that off. The cross-country on the [private pilot certificate] is dead reckoning. You have to be able to read a map to navigate.' Well, he didn't get along too well. He'd gotten dependent on that GPS. You know, all that stuff can quit working, but the good ol' map doesn't quit. It's right there."
Johnson says that she has seen a decline in pilots' map-reading skills, and she partially blames instructors. "Some of the instructors are not emphasizing map reading and that bothers me," she says. "I don't care what you've got-GPS, Loran, VOR, NDB-any of them can quit working. But the map won't quit if you've kept up with where you are."
Exams are another aspect of flying that has changed since Johnson began teaching in the 1940s. She uses her own experience as an example. "I started instructing the very day I got my instructor rating. It was May 15, 1947. I went to Nashville and took the flight test. As much as you have to do on the flight test now, I couldn't have even gotten back by night. But then you didn't do a thing but fly. You had no oral [exam] and not much flying. So I passed and got back to Morristown about two o'clock that afternoon." Today, pilots are required to pass both written and oral exams before they fly with an examiner for any certificate.
When Johnson became an instructor, the owners of the Morristown Flying Service, Bob Jones and Tommy Moore, had been instructing for the War Training Service-the WTS provided primary training for future military pilots before and during World War II-and they were tired of teaching. They handed over all 15 of their students to Johnson, and she started instructing that very day. "Now a lot of instructors don't get a student for months or even a year, but I just felt like I was in the right place at the right time," she says.
Many of Johnson's early students were beneficiaries of the G.I. Bill, which was available to veterans after the war and paid for thousands of young men to go to college or learn to fly. "Right after the war everybody was going to learn to fly, everybody on earth. And the G.I. Bill paid it all," she says. "That was good. It sure was. There were just lots and lots of people flying. There are quite a number flying now, but not that many."
Over the years, about 90 percent of Johnson's students have been men and 10 percent women, although she believes there are a few more women now. Overall, she says, the students haven't changed much in the past 50 years. "Most everybody you know that wants to start flying gets all fired up about it," she says. "You know it's addictive, very addictive. So once they get started, most keep going. Once in a while somebody, especially somebody who's got a family, [will] not be able to afford it. But generally they take it back up once their kids get out of the way."
While the addiction to flying has endured, Johnson has seen less consistency in the Civil Aviation Authority and its successor, the Federal Aviation Administration. Sometimes that in-consistency can be frustrating. "They [FAA personnel] all seem to have their own method of doing things. They want us [examiners and instructors] to all be standardized, but they're not. They don't always want the same thing or the same way. But they're pretty good guys, and I enjoy working with them."
Today Evelyn Johnson is a legend in aviation circles. Inside the Evelyn Bryan Johnson Terminal Building, home to the Morristown Flying Service FBO, a wall dedicated to Johnson is lined with plaques and awards. She has been recognized with the FAA Kitty Hawk Award, been inducted into the Women in Aviation Pioneers Hall of Fame, and recently was inducted into the National Association of Flight Instructors Hall of Fame. She has been featured by local and national news organizations, including Dan Rather's Eye on America. And yet none of this has gone to Johnson's head. You can still hear her on the unicom in Morristown nearly every day. Although she will turn 90 in November, Johnson still instructs and still gives exams several times a week.
Despite all of the changes that Johnson has seen over the years, some things haven't changed at all. She still enjoys instructing as much as she did when she began. The fact that she has soloed more than 3,000 students attests to that. Johnson says she will stop instructing only when she can no longer pass the required medical exam. She currently holds a second-class medical. When she is not flying with students or examinees, Johnson can be found at the airport sharing stories. "Hangar flying, you know, is nothing in the world but a lot of lies, usually. That still remains the same." It's good to know that some things never change.
