AOPA Pilot Magazine - January 2021 - 112

PILOTS COUNTRY MUSICIAN, COMANCHE PILOT

Clayton Corn
Texas event promoter loves to fly
B Y J U L I E S U M M E R S WA L K E R

112 | AOPA PILOT January 2021

LOGBOOK

WHO | Clayton Corn, CEO

Corn caught the flying bug early. " Our
next-door neighbor had a Cessna 210 when I
was a kid. He took my dad and I up for the first
time when I was probably 8 years old. Dad let
me sit in the front seat. It was right at sunrise on a clear morning at Clovis Municipal
Airport in eastern New Mexico. I'll never,
ever forget looking out the window at the
right main as it lifted off from the pavement
and the way the airplane's shadow separated
from us and grew smaller and smaller. I was
completely hooked. I thought about aviation
as a career, but I figured out mid-high school
that I had a real shot at being a successful
musician, so I chased that dream all over the
world for most of my adult life. "
Corn was living in Nashville when the terrorist attacks of September 11 happened. He
feared his dream of eventually becoming a
pilot could be affected, so he started training
and got his certificate in early 2003. " I mostly
fly for fun and family travel, but I've been flying more for work lately, or at least I was before
the pandemic, " he said.
" The best aviation activity or experience
for me was going to Oshkosh. That's part of

Craftsmen Events, " Maestro of
Mayhem " (COO) Go Wheels Up!
Texas
HOURS | 500-plus
FAVORITE AIRCRAFT | " I own a
Comanche and man, is it a great
airplane. Goes pretty fast and far
on not a lot of gas, and it's hard to
overload it. "
EXTRA | " I've flown all over the
country. One of my more memorable trips was a work trip that
took me from Clovis, New Mexico,
to Liberal, Kansas, to Rapid City,
South Dakota, then all the way up
to the Canadian border and back
to Clovis, all in one day in a V-35
Bonanza. "

why I wanted to do Go Wheels
Up! I wanted to at least try to build
something like that, albeit on a
much smaller scale, here in Texas, "
he said. " Cory and I were talking,
and he said let's do a music festival and have the cool stuff we love
like cars and airplanes, " said Corn.
The group hopes to bring back the
event post-COVID-19.
EMAIL julie.walker@aopa.org

CHRIS ROSE

BEHIND EVERY GREAT household-name musician are the
touring piano players, guitarists, and back-up vocalists. A
touring musician can spend
up to three straight months
or more on the road, playing music venues across the
country and providing that
special sound that makes
a musician great. For 25
years, pianist Clayton Corn
was one of those guys, playing venues like Red Rocks
in Colorado and The Gorge
in Washington for stars like
Kenny Chesney, Huey Lewis,
Phil Vassar, ZZ Top, and Pat
Green. He could write his own country song:
" I spent over a million miles on a tour bus. "
" I grew up in a tiny town on the Texas/
New Mexico border, Farwell, Texas. I moved to
Nashville in my early 20s and became a touring
and studio musician and did that for the better
part of two decades. That's where I learned to
fly, right there at KBNA. The chief instructor at
the flight school flew Alan Jackson's [Lockheed]
JetStar. It was neat seeing the fleet in the hangar when we'd taxi in from a lesson, " Corn said.
After the birth of his first child, he decided
to stay closer to home. He started Craftsmen
Events, an event production company, producing acts in the Austin, Texas, area with friend
and fellow musician Cory Morrow. The pair
produced the highly successful Go Wheels
Up! Texas event, which was supposed to be
part of the AOPA Fly-In schedule in 2020 but
was cancelled because of COVID-19. But just
like a country song, Corn found a silver lining
in the pandemic-more time to fly his Piper
Comanche and finish his instrument and multiengine ratings. " If nothing else, I'll consider
myself a real pilot and use that [experience] to
produce more aviation events, " he said.

AOPA Pilot Magazine - January 2021

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