Flying Together

Sharing the skies — separately

Fortunately, general aviation is full of couples who share flight, and it's becoming more common to find couples who share flying duties, with both spouses holding pilot certificates. So, it takes a bit of an effort for a flying couple to stand out, to make an arrival that involves more than just a chirping of tires. Meet the Normarks. When they arrive, it's almost always as a flight of two in their matched set of Piper Super Cubs.

Nancy and Ron Normark share two houses, one in town and one on the rural airport they built near their home, but they rarely share the same airplane. Instead, in this marriage, when it's time to decide who is flying which leg of a trip, the answer is simple: They both are. In this hers-and-his arrangement, Nancy owns and flies a 1955 150-horsepower PA-18-150, and Ron flies a 1950- model 105-horsepower version of the same airframe. Normally, this well-kept, identically painted pair of Pipers would draw attention whenever landing together, but the plot thickens when the airport crowd realizes that the pilots are husband and wife.

Then come the inevitable jokes, usually beginning with something along the lines of, "What's the matter, you two can't get along well enough to share one airplane?" or "How come you pay double to fly to the same place?" Although there may be a little good-natured ribbing in the jokes, the questions are valid. Why pay for two airplanes with twice the insurance and twice the maintenance when one airplane would get the couple where they're going? Oddly enough, it began with one of the Normarks having a deep-seated fear of flying.

Ron grew up in Portland, Oregon, the site of his earliest aviation memory. As a third-grader, he recalls, he saw one of Molt Taylor's Aero Cars parked on a city street. He remembers, "It was parked there without the wings and the tail sections, but I walked around it and looked at it, and for some reason, I knew what it was." His next aviation experience came during a summertime visit to a family farm when he watched a crop duster, flying either a Piper PA-11 or Super Cub, "climb the roof of the barn with his airplane, and bend the 2-foot-tall lightning rod on the top of the barn. He got the airplane down OK, but I stood there flabbergasted...and it made me want to learn to fly right then."

Later, after his family moved to the Chicago area, and unbeknown to his mother, Ron used some of the money from his part-time job to sneak out to the Palwaukee Municipal Airport for lessons. He soloed a Cub there, but leaving for college ended his training.

Following college in Illinois (and a stint painting "10,000 car bodies" for General Motors), he did a tour with the Army in Vietnam before a job with IBM brought him to the Research Triangle Park area in North Carolina. It was there, on a blind double date, that he met Nancy. Immediately smitten by her and she by him, they were inseparable. Soon they were married, and Ron left IBM to start renovating houses, and eventually he built a profitable real-estate management business.

Nancy was born, grew up, and was schooled in North Carolina. As a single mom, she was raising a 2-year-old when she met Ron. Their marriage was a partnership from the beginning. When Ron decided he had had enough of corporate work and started out on his own, Nancy kept her job at IBM to guarantee a regular income.

Life was good for the Normarks, but for Ron, there was something missing, something that had been missing since the day that he had last flown almost 20 years earlier. With his newfound success as an entrepreneur, he now had both time and money to resume flying lessons, and he did so in earnest.

Nancy laughs when she recalls being a little jealous of Ron's freedom. "I'd come home from work and ask what he did that day, and he'd say, 'I went to the airport and flew around.' This went on for about three months, and I said this is ridiculous, and I gave my notice at IBM, and said I was going to stay home and have fun, too."

As he resumed his training in 1986, Ron made a full commitment by buying a 1946 Aeronca Champ. He remembers not getting much feedback from his instructor, just the occasional, "It's OK, you're doing all right." Ron says, "I struggled along and soloed again. I finally got the hang of it and flew the airplane, and I went right on through, tried not to slow down, and by the spring of 1987, I had my certificate."

Nancy says, "Even after Ron got his certificate, I had no desire to fly whatsoever." In fact, Nancy had a fear of heights, even to the point of "being scared to death to cross a high bridge," and with that, a well-developed fear of flying. She'd even passed up a high- school trip to Europe because she was afraid of the flight. It was a fear she would overcome, but only by confronting it head-on.

Thinking back 20 years, Nancy recalls, "After he got his license I wouldn't fly with him, so the logical thing to do, I guess, was to take lessons. But I fought it. I was scared. I was scared of airplanes and did not want to do it." But somehow, she forced herself to begin lessons in the Champ, lessons that were interrupted soon after her solo when, during an inspection, a mechanic condemned the Champ's wings. Following the new family tradition, Nancy then bought her first airplane to allow her to complete her training. It was a Piper PA-17 Vagabond, and with the tutelage of instructor Robert Chisnhall, she earned her certificate in April 1989.

When asked why they both learned to fly in tailwheel aircraft instead of a Cessna 150, Nancy says, "I didn't know what a 150 was; I didn't know any better. I've got maybe three hours in a nosewheel airplane, and I probably couldn't even land a 150." For Ron, it also was a nonissue, as from the beginning, he had wanted to own either a Piper J-3 Cub or a Champ. It just happened that when he needed an airplane for lessons, the Champ was available nearby, and would become the first of a number of airplanes the Normarks have owned over the past two decades.

Before the first of the Super Cubs found a home in the Normarks' hangar, the couple had added a 1946 Swift to the Champ and Vagabond. The Swift was Ron's to fly before and during the time Nancy was using her Vagabond for training, but was sold just before she got her certificate. Neither remembers exactly when, but during that time they also purchased a Cessna 170 so they would have a seat for their son Jordan, who 20 years later also is a pilot. It was an airplane they would keep until a few years ago.

Also during that time, Ron came across an advertisement for a 600-hour Super Cub in Nampa, Idaho. After learning it was "all original," he flew to Idaho, bought the Super Cub, and flew it home, a trip he fondly remembers as his first time flying over the Rockies, and for his stop for a night in Kimball, Nebraska. "I remember the FBO operator asking if I wanted the airplane put in the hangar, and I wasn't about to turn that down. He gave me a pickup truck and I drove into town, and then it started hailing. It hailed 6 inches in a matter of a half-hour. It hailed so much that they got snowplows out to clear it." The Normarks still own that Super Cub, which is now being refurbished, and which will be flown mostly by Jordan.

Super Cub number two was located in North Dakota, and Ron and Nancy flew their first Super Cub out to retrieve it. Ron had found the 4,000-hour crop duster in Trade-A-Plane and bought it sight unseen. His impression upon first seeing it was, "It looked terrible; it had tin on top of the skylight, had galvanized steel baffling and just looked awful. But it flew great. And I looked inside the wings and all the metal was shining; there was no corrosion, and there were no splices in the fuselage." On the way home from North Dakota, Nancy flew the 150-horsepower Super Cub, while Ron flew the "new" Super Cub, a 105-horsepower version without an electrical system. This is the airplane that Ron now flies.

The third of their three Super Cubs joined the family after Ron and his son came across an ad in the local newspaper on a very snowy Sunday morning. A quick call to the owner led to Ron's learning that the airplane was on a private strip only 11 miles away, and that three other prospective buyers would be coming to see it the next day. Ron and Jordan hopped into the family's four-wheel-drive truck and "crept down the highway through the snow," Ron says. Within hours, he bought the "doggy-looking" PA-18 that had served as a crop sprayer, had droop tips, and was suffering from sagging fabric on the turtle deck.

He recalls, "I flew it back and hated the way it flew; with those droop tips out there, it felt like it had barbells on the end of the wings. I knew it would be a rebuild job, and with the help of Bob Woods, a local Cub expert, we did rebuild it, and it's the 150-horse one that Nancy flies."

With their ever-growing stable of airplanes, the hangar they were renting at a local turf field was no longer sufficient, so in the early 1990s, the Normarks located 26 acres of rural property that they bought at an auction on the county courthouse steps. By moving 10,000 yards of dirt, they created a 2,300-foot-long runway, one in which there is a very pronounced dip almost exactly at the midway point. Two years after the runway was completed, they built a large hangar to hold both their flyable and nonflyable aircraft (they still have the Champ), and a house on the field soon followed.

Although the U shape of the Normark's runway may cause other pilots to look a bit askance, Ron thinks it's just about the perfect shape, because, "It's always a downhill takeoff, and you've got an uphill slope to stop on. What more could you ask for?" The Normarks say that because the Super Cubs are quiet airplanes they get along well with their neighbors, even with two new subdivisions built since they completed their runway in 1995, and they host a large fly-in of friends each spring.

Year round, whenever the weather cooperates, they usually gather three or four of those friends for a couple of hours of formation flying to enjoy a meal 50 miles away, or just to share a little time in the air with kindred spirits. Nancy says, "They usually make me lead because with the 150 horsepower, I have the fastest airplane." But Ron claims that it's because she is such a good navigator that she should be called "Auto" for "autopilot."

Ron and Nancy Normark tend to smile and laugh often when they talk about flying, evidence of their appreciation of how it has transformed their lives, and their marriage. And although it's not unheard of for them to share one airplane on longer flights, as opposed to most flying couples, their flights truly are two flights at once, a most unusual form of aeronautical togetherness.

Charles H. Stites is an aviation photographer and writer.