The Iowan

In the July/August 2010 issue of The Iowan

Airborne
True Love Takes Flight

Story by Terri Queck-Matzie

Photography by Larry Reynolds ]

The early morning air is crisp and clear. The new sun shines bright. The ever-so-slight wind barely stirs the windsock.

NC 98733, a yellow Piper Cub, stands ready and waiting on the tarmac, a lone figure in the remote airfield. Overhead the sound of another aircraft. Another soul seizing the opportunity to be one with the air and sky. The hum is momentarily drowned out by passing farm machinery, a reminder of an otherwise terrestrial existence.

The pilot leaves his quarters and walks toward the Piper. He lovingly checks the craft — greets her, touches her with the comfortable familiarity of an old friend.

The propeller starts to turn. The engine coughs and sputters, then purrs with precision.

Slowly the plane taxis toward the runway. Then speed. And more speed. Bars and wires tense in anticipation. The nose rises. The rudders adjust. For an instant, time and space and reality suspend.

Airborne.

The first time I flew, it wasn’t a daredevil thing,” says Olin “Olie” Pash of Harlan. “I just felt free as a bird.”

Yet “liberation” doesn’t quite capture the sensation. “It’s like meeting a woman for the first time and knowing it’s love at first sight,” he explains. When it comes to a love affair with flight, Pash has been head over heels most of his life. He’s well-known across the Midwest as one of the premier stunt pilots. Spins and dips. Dives and rolls. Pash orchestrates them all with daring and expertise from the cockpit of his famous Pitts Special S1S, a craft he’s commanded for the past 26 years.

Pash first fell in love in the summer of 1944. He marveled at the flying exhibitions at the county fair, but his father cautioned him: “Never go up in one of those things.”

He instead went through the air on a motorcycle, learning to ride before he had a driver’s license. During a road trip with a friend, Pash encountered a 105 Stinson at the Omaha Municipal Airport. They took a $3 ride, and he was hooked. “I said, ‘I wonder if I could ever learn to fly one of those things,’” recalls Pash. “And the pilot said, ‘If you can ride one of those things down there, you can fly one of these.’” That’s all Pash needed to hear.

He first learned to fly a J3 Cub, landing it in the hay fields he had baled near Harlan the summer before. He joined the war effort at the end of WWII, enlisting in the Navy so he could continue to fly. When he returned home he made aviation his life, managing the Harlan airport. He still flies today, at age 82, but gave up stunt work a few years ago.

A quiet man who despite his reputation in the air shuns the limelight on the ground, Pash tells stories of air shows, competitions, and fly-ins. Of people he’s met and the camaraderie that exists between pilots. “They’re a close-knit group,” he says. “There’s a bond — of shared information, shared experience.” And a shared love of the sport.

Adventure & Freedom
Pash joins nearly 5,600 licensed Iowa pilots, a growing legion of aviators that love planes, love flight, and love all things related. It was 100 years ago, in 1910, that Art Hartman made the first recorded flight in the state, taking off near Burlington in his hand-rigged “air-bike.” The spark ignited a flying fury, and now many noteworthy Iowans line the walls of the Iowa Aviation Hall of Fame: Clarence Chamberlain, Neta Snook Southern, the Wright Brothers, Tuskegee Airmen. Aviation in Iowa is a $5.4 billion-a-year industry.

It’s the ordinary pilot, however — whose very being aches to be airborne — who dots the Iowa skies. Ordinary people with one great passion. Folks who left their hearts and souls in the sky on their first flights. And every one of them with a story to tell nearly as good as Pash’s.

They are mostly weekend enthusiasts. They gather at flight breakfasts all over the Midwest. They eat pancakes and omelets. They talk planes. They swap stories of close calls and true love.

For Rachel Aukes of Ankeny, finding that special someone and discovering the wonder of flight came hand in hand. “After our first date I was hooked on both,” says Rachel of her husband, Brian, and her first flight in his Boeing Stearman.

For Brian Aukes, finding love in an airplane was his destiny. He grew up on the grounds of the Aledo, Illinois, airport and took to the skies in his father’s crop duster at age 5. By 16 he soloed; at 18 he had his commercial license.

The couple has converted an airport hangar into their residence (“It’s sort of our ‘cabin on the runway,’” says Rachel), but they spend nearly every free moment in the air. “Some people collect cars or play golf. I like planes and like to fly,” explains Brian. Now herself a licensed pilot, Rachel takes the controls as often as she can.

“It’s the peaceful feeling of freedom,” says Brian of the attraction of flight, though not all experiences are peaceful. He’s had a few close calls. He was once waiting on the ground when another pilot stalled out and crashed a few feet away. The pilot was killed and Brian was shaken. But the experience didn’t keep him out of the air. Nor did a bit of ice-induced engine trouble or malfunctioning landing gear or low fuel. “It’s amazing how far fumes can get you,” says Brian with a chuckle.

The Aukeses accept such challenges as part of the adventure. Brian attempts to put it into words. “It’s that feeling of leaving the world behind.”

Immense vistas are in sharp contrast to precise detail. The earth stretches out as far as the eye can see, dotted with homes and businesses and fields and lakes and trees. Intense color. Muted hues. All laid out as if by some master design created from an aerial map.

The plane rises higher. The cars and people and streets and rivers below become a diminutive diorama of themselves. The earth lies still. The sky unfolds.

let’s fly!
Learn more about Iowa aviation history, events,
adventures, and opportunities:

Iowa Aviation Museum and Iowa Aviation Hall of Fame
www.flyingmuseum.com

Iowa Department of Transportation Office of Aviation
www.iowadot.gov/aviation

Iowa Aviation Promotion Group
www.flyiowa.org

Brian and Rachel Aukes’ Virtual Hangar
www.halffastadventures.com

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