My friend, Jeff B., was an aviation
wunderkind who procured his PPSEL at the age of sixteen and was well into his multi-engine, instrument, and commercial ratings when I met him in 1976. He was working concurrently on his ten-thousand-ton marine Captain's license! He was sixteen and I was twenty-six. I had just soloed then, while Jeff had accumulated in excess of five-hundred hours. Our very gifted flight instructor at KSSI (St. Simons Island, Georgia) had amassed in excess of twenty-eight thousand hours; he said Jeff was the best pilot he had ever trained! Jeff was one of those phenomenal people who preferred being airborne to having both feet firmly planted on
Terra Firma. We'd fly together often in many different types - Jeff was enamored of a bright red Cessna 177RG and had designs on purchasing that aircraft.
Our small aviation community as well as most of the twelve-thousand inhabitants of the Island were horrified to learn that Jeff, not even nineteen years of age, had been killed along with three of his aviator friends in an aircraft accident in 1978. The four of them had departed KSSI for a flight to KHOU (Houston, Texas), where a mechanic Jeff knew was going to give that Cardinal a detailed pre-purchase examination. The aircraft went down in sight of the active runway at Hobby. Fuel exhaustion. Inexplicable, because Jeff simply wouldn't overlook or permit such an elementary mistake. There was no post-crash fire. It turned out that Jeff had been asleep in the rear seat. He never knew what happened. Mercifully!
A crowd of six or seven hundred people gathered one soft springtime day in the Spanish moss-covered towering Live Oaks which guard the burial grounds at Christ Episcopal Church, which has offered continuous services since 1736. We had come to embrace Jeff's young soul before it departed Earth on its first but final flight. After a short sweet funeral service, Jeff's father stepped forward and stood beside the officiating priest and Jeff's coffin. There, amongst flitting dragonflies and the calls of distant egrets, Jeff's father read a poem in a steady voice which all could hear. The poem was John Gillespie Magee Jr.'s
High Flight.
There was not a dry eye there that day, and I weep as I remember Jeff - a fine young man whom I was privileged to call friend.
I thank Pilot DAR for his prescience and empathy in commencing this thread.
- Ed
