AOPA Pilot Magazine - July 2017 - 112

PILOTS NEW YORK MECHANIC

Richard 'Mac' MacVicar
Small-town A&P outside the big city
BY PHIL SCOT T

LOGBOOK

WHO | Richard "Mac" MacVicar
HOURS | 8,750
CERTIFICATES AND
RATINGS | Commercial pilot

single- and multiengine land,
instrument, ground instructor,
A&P, IA.
FAVORITE AIRCRAFT | He's
owned 13 airplanes to date,
five of which were Piper J-3
Cubs. "If I was younger I
would like nothing more than
a 180-horsepower 172."
EXTRA | In one small corner
across the Hudson River from
Westchester County, a pilot
could find Christie Airport,
Miller Airport, Orangeburg
CAP Airport, Rockland
Airport, and Spring Valley
Airport (later renamed
Ramapo Valley Airport) when
MacVicar learned to fly. Most
were carved out of farmland.

112 | AOPA PILOT July 2017

STEFAN FALKE

AT RANDALL AIRPORT in Middletown, New York, 89-year-old (he
turns 90 on July 11, 2017) Richard "Mac" MacVicar has an insulated hangar with a 90-horsepower Piper PA-18 Super Cub and a
repair shop inside. Gliders and ultralights outnumber light aircraft
at Randall-soaring and hang gliding are big on the weekends. "I
got a young helper-he's only 81," Mac says. "Between the two of
us we make a good pair, but I notice the planes are getting lower
and heavier every year."
Mac grew up in Bergenfield, New Jersey. "I came out of high
school and enlisted in the Navy when the Germans surrendered,"
he says. "When I went to mech[anic] school they dropped the
bomb." It seems like every veteran who didn't go to college on the
GI Bill took flying lessons, and Mac was no exception. He soloed
in 1945, and got his A&P certificate in 1947. In 1948 the owner of
Rockland Airport hired the 21-year-old Mac as the field mechanic.
By one count New York state had 73 landing strips-23 in remote
Rockland County alone. A long strip measured 2,500 feet. One runway swung around a curve; one had a hump in the middle. Nothing
was paved. "Spring Valley had a stone-dust runway," he says.
"We had several quarries nearby, and when stone dust got wet it

hardened it up a little bit for you.
It wasn't exactly pavement."
Mac got his private pilot
certificate in 1949, and his instrument rating soon after. But by
then veterans were graduating from college, accepting white-collar jobs in Manhattan, and moving to the suburbs. GA grew a little
quieter, and then the suburbs spread north and developers bought
up those tiny airports. "I was around Rockland County for many
moons," he said, "and when they built the Tappan Zee Bridge, all
of a sudden the people from the city moved up there, then they
pushed the Garden State Parkway up and now it's wall-to-wall
houses. Caproc [Orangeburg CAP Airport] was so rural you had to
give a driver directions to get there. Now there's a 25-story office
building there."
In 1964 Mac moved north to the relative wilds of Orange
County and opened a shop at Randall Airport, a 2,811-foot-by-60foot asphalt strip, which lies seven nautical miles southwest of
Orange County Airport and 14 nm west of Stewart International
Airport. With the glider business, Randall is safe from development
for now. "I own the hangar and two acres on the airport-which
is a thorn in the owner's [Aerodrome Dev Corp's] side," Mac says.
He still takes care of the towplanes, and he does mostly annuals.
"I've got to do something to pay the taxes," he says.
AOPA

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of AOPA Pilot Magazine - July 2017