AOPA Pilot Magazine - November 2019 - 24

FLYING LIFE

Leaving a legacy

BY NATALIE BINGHAM HOOVER

What will yours be?
FOREST WITCRAFT, a teacher, wrote, "A hundred years
from now it will not matter what my bank account
was, the sort of house I lived in, or the kind of car I
drove...but the world may be different because I was
important in the life of a child." I've been thinking a
lot about that concept of legacy lately, because I was
recently asked to write the eulogy of a dear friend,
Grant Bales, who died at age 87 after a long, full life.
Witcraft's concept of legacy was that the difference
we make in the life of another will be the only thing
that endures, and in aviation, we have a similar concept. It's called the "Flight Instructor Pyramid."
The flight instructor is at the top of the pyramid and
passes on a certain set of skills and knowledge to, say,
his 10 students, who pass that on to their 10 students,
and so on. In a short matter of years, that original
flight instructor has "taught" hundreds of students.
Grant earned his flight instructor certificate
in 1955 and instructed constantly, serving as chief
instructor of a large flight school, right up until his
final days. That's 64 years of flight instructing and
hundreds, if not thousands, of students. If the pyramid theory holds true, then Grant's skills and
knowledge will continue to be passed on for many
generations to come. Talk about a legacy.
I asked Grant once, when he was a younger man
(83 years old), to put together a list of things he
thought were important for pilots and flight instructors to know. I thought I knew what he would say. Stay
off the brakes...look outside...get coordinated. But I was
wrong. It turns out when you have been instructing for
more than 50 years, the things you want to pass on to
future generations of pilots are less about the airplane
and more about the pilot as a person:
THERE IS NO SHAME IN NOT KNOWING,
ONLY IN NOT ASKING.

NATALIE BINGHAM
HOOVER recently
accepted the vacant
position left by
Grant's passing-
chief instructor at
the second largest
flight school in
Mississippi. Talk
about big shoes.

"When I first obtained my instructor rating in 1955, the
examiner issued my certificate with the admonition
that I now had a license to learn how to fly. I thought
I already knew how; I had just attained the rank of
instructor! However, those first few students I trained
in the tailwheel Cessna 140 proved I couldn't have been
more wrong. Don't ever be afraid to admit you don't
know everything. There is still, to this day, so much I
do not know. I ask for help all the time and consider it a
compliment when someone asks me for help."

24 | AOPA PILOT November 2019

AVIATION HAS NO PLACE FOR DINOSAURS.

"One of the great things about aviation is that it is
always changing. I have been blessed to see a lot of
those changes in the past 70 years or so and cannot imagine what the next 70 years will bring. I
remember when GPS approaches were added to the
Instrument Rating Practical Test Standards. A few
instructor friends around my age refused to learn the
new technology. They said it would never last. As you
can imagine, they are no longer teaching-or flying at
all, for that matter. I cannot understand that mentality. You have to stay relevant."
EMBRACE TECHNOLOGY AS A TOOL, BUT DO NOT
BECOME DEPENDENT ON IT.

"While it's important to keep up with current technology, what will you do if it fails? In my day, if you
got lost in an airplane, you would descend low enough
to read the name of the town on the closest water
tower. In Richmond, Kentucky, the airport manager
also owned a car dealership. So he painted a bright
white circle on the roof of his dealership with an
arrow pointing you to the airport. Lots of towns had
little hints like that. But you had to have a decent
amount of situational awareness to make use of those
clues. Pilots these days are so dependent on that little magenta line that they forget to use their brains."
DON'T FORGET TO HAVE FUN.

"I can vividly remember the days when we would
take off and fly over the farmland of Kentucky. If
you saw smoke coming out of a friend's chimney,
you would find a spot to land in their field and go
inside for a cup of coffee. People took the time to
enjoy life then. With today's pace, I think that sometimes gets lost. But that doesn't mean you can't still
have a little fun in an airplane. It's simply not worth
doing otherwise."
I hope by sharing some of Grant's tips that the common-sense approach of his generation will continue
for years to come. What kind of legacy will I leave if
I'm lucky enough to still be flying 50 years from now?
I cannot imagine. But I hope I will be something like
Grant: young at heart, and wise enough to know that
there is still so much to learn.
AOPA
myaviation101.com

http://www.myaviation101.com

AOPA Pilot Magazine - November 2019

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