Spruce Creek Fly-in Folks in the News
Friday, May 21, 2004
Lear takes one last roll in the sky
By VICTORIA ALDRICH
The Daytona Beach News-Journal Staff Writer
SPRUCE CREEK FLY IN — He'll be 76 on Monday, but William Lear Jr. looked like Peter Pan last Monday as he hovered over Heinz Peier's Aero Vodochody L39ZO training jet.
News-Journal//DAVID TUCKER
Bill Lear Jr. talks with pilot Heinz Peier on Monday morning before taking off for his first flight in a fighter aircraft since 1960. Peier is the owner of the L39 fighter and a Spruce Creek Fly-In resident.
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"Old fighter pilots never die, they just get hoisted away," Lear joked as his harnessed body was eased into the cockpit. He smiled down at his dangling arms and legs.
He needed no help climbing behind the wheel of any of the 52 models of aircraft he flew as a distinguished Air Force and commercial test pilot, a love lost to health problems in recent years. Age has slowed his limbs, but it hasn't killed his passion for the rush of barreling through the clouds in a finely crafted warplane, giving it that last salutatory roll.
Minutes can pass like hours as a plane slowly taxies down an airport's maze of strips to the runway, but they flashed in an instant with thumbs up to the crowd as the plane streaked off the pavement, a moment Lear has waited more than half his life to savor since he quit flying fighter jets in 1960.
"He's as happy as a pig in mud right now," his friend John McCollister joked, explaining that Fly-In residents got together to give the community's "best pilot" one last turn behind the wheel.
Brenda Lear observed that the short trip to Kennedy Space Center and back was just what her husband needed, since he's reflected lately that he has outlived his father, LearJet Corp. and Motorola Corp. founder Bill Lear, who died at 75.
It also was the perfect swan song to a career that began at age 17, when Lear purchased his first racer, a Lockheed P-38 Lightning, becoming the youngest aviator to fly that fighter jet.
Lifelong friend and neighbor Ralph Hane remembers why he set that record.
"He came into my father's business in Jackson, Mich., wanting to buy a P-51 Mustang, and my father wouldn't sell it if a kid was going to fly it," Hane said with a laugh.
After a short racing career, he served as president of LearJet S.A., the Swiss branch of his family's company, and was the only foreign pilot to fly the experimental Swiss P-16 jet after two prototypes crashed, a design that later was incorporated into the Learjet.
Over the years, Lear has racked up more than 7,500 hours of flight time, experiences he recalled in his 2000 book, "Fly Fast . . . Sin Boldly: Flying, Spying & Surviving."
Friends from Canada and Switzerland were among the crowd that gathered to cheer him on. Watching him lift off, Martha Cantorini said she felt like the same 17-year-old girl who watched him thunder off the start line in his first big race, the 1947 American Bendix Cross Country Race, in which he placed seventh.
"I was there waving goodbye to him," said Cantorini, his first wife,who came here with her current husband from British Columbia for his special day. "We were married two weeks later. A 17 year-old-pilot flying in an intercontinental air race was very exciting.
"It was very exciting with Bill. We were very young. I even flew piggyback with him in a P-38. There was never a dull moment," Cantorini said, though being a pilot's wife is rough when they want to show off.
"We'd been married two weeks when he took me up for a flight lesson in a Stearman. He snap-rolled me on takeoff and I didn't even have my seatbelt on. He said, 'You don't need it,' and I could have killed him," she said with a laugh. "It's hard on a pilot's wife each time they go out. You never know if they're going to come back."
On Monday, Lear was delighted by how well he handled the Czech-manufactured plane, a former East German Air Force jet rebuilt and modified from the ground up by Peier, a former commercial pilot.
"I said, 'I never had so much fun with my clothes on,' " Lear joked. "It felt like I just stepped out of the plane the day before. I did a roll to the right and a roll to the left just to see if I could still do it."
"He said it was 45 years since he's been in a jet plane, but he sure didn't forget how to fly it," Peier said with a big smile as Brenda Lear popped a cork on a bottle of champagne.
Mugging for the camera as he was hoisted down, he sat his wife on his knee for a picture and a big kiss.
"What a great way to end it," a passerby commented.