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PROFILES
Bill Gunn
Manager of TxDOT Aviation Education and InformationPrograms
June 12, 1997
When you walk into the TxDOT/AOPA flight instructor refresher clinics,
Bill Gunn is there to welcome you with his enthusiastic grin. The
grin is for you and for the entire world of aviation. After thirty
years of flying, he is still excited about airplanes, pilots and all
they have to teach each other. “You meet people and see what
they do in their airplane,” he says, “whether it flaps,
flies, floats or levitates, and you realize there is so much you don’t
know.”
Bill is one of the instructors who bring Texas instructors up to
speed as laws change the FARs, technicians improve our equipment and
weathermen scramble their formats. He is also the man in charge of
the Texas Department of Transportation’s Aviation Education
Programs as its manager. His mission is training Texas pilots and
airport personnel through refresher clinics and safety seminars, plus
educating the public through such programs as curricula and projects
for school children.
He brings unusual wealth to his job--his own experience. It is a
rich tapestry, with highlights as varied as flying low-level missions
at 540 knots over the bomb-blasted, war-torn, heat-zapped countryside
of Southeast Asia, followed by a three year stroll through the British
Isles in a sporty-looking, little Turbulent, as the Mutt-half of a
Mutt and Jeff comedy routine for a British Barnstormer troupe. Add
to that, corporate flying, ROTC instructing, airport management, businessman
flying and plain Jane flight instruction.
Flying was always somewhere in the background while Bill grew up.
It was both ordinary and extraordinary. His father was in the Air
Force in Texas and overseas, so people around him flew as a matter
of fact. But they also flew, as a matter of daring and adventure.
His father was a WWII prisoner of war who escaped imprisonment by
hiding and flying in the fuselage of an ME-109 and then turned around
and flew back to Romania with a fleet of B-17s and B-24s to rescue
other prisoners.
When Bill’s family moved to England he was 4-years-old. It
was 1950. Building rubble, rationing lines and the memory of war airplanes
lingered overhead. Airplanes were simply awesome.
Later, back in the Texas skies, 8-year-old Bill discovered something
else, they were accessible. The chief of police in Bryan had a Stinson
at Colter Field. One day he took Bill and two friends flying. “I
still remember the airplane’s smell,” Bill says. “You
know how planes smell on hot summer days? I was nervous, but no one
got sick. I sat in the back as we flew over town and thought, ‘This
is great!’ It was the first time I had any cognitive awareness
that you could fly a little airplane and enjoy it.”
Seven years later he got the front seat and a shot at the controls
of a Cessna 170 when his father flew the whole family from Texas to
California and back. “It had an old Narco Super Homer, one of
the very first VOR receivers. You could either talk on two channels
or tune in a VOR. You had to pull the thing out and listen to a tone
that went ‘Wheeeooooweee.” You tuned the crystal and pushed
it in. Then, if you were lucky, the needle would center and you got
a line of position on the VOR.” It was a long haul in a small
plane.
Bill didn’t take up flying himself until after he graduated
from the University of Texas. It was 1968, early Vietnam years. He
joined the Air Force, hoping to fly, but a slight vision irregularity
kept him out of the front seat, so he trained for the back as a navigator
and weapons systems officer. He excelled, so he had his choice of
airplanes. “I wanted to fly the F-4,” he says. “It
was the King Kong airplane of the time, fun and reeeaaal fast.”
He chose RF-4s, the reconnaissance version of the F-4 and trained
at Bergstrom AFB in Austin. In his spare time he joined their aero
club and earned his private license. “But, I really learned
to fly in the F4,” Bill says. He was in the back seat, but Charles
Garrity was in the front. Garrity was a civilian flight instructor
and Bill was an eager student. Over the next several thousand hours
of flight time Bill learned multi-engine techniques, instrument flying,
formation and jet plane handling. His experience landed him civilian
flying jobs in a Citation and a Saberliner.
The Vietnam experience was intense. The RF-4 was totally unarmed.
Its mission was photography “The fighter-bombers would come
in and drop bombs, and really upset everybody,” Bill says, “Then
20 minutes later we came along, a single RF-4, to photograph the results.
By that time they were hopping mad. So we flew faster than the speed
of heat, real low and unpredictably, so it was the luck of the draw
for them to hit you.”
Still, some bullets found their mark. “Getting hit is a very
personal experience,” he says. “At first you’re
angry, then scared, then angry again. Then, oddly enough, you settle
down and start appreciating their skill. We knew where the good gunners
were and the weak ones. We graded them by Air Force skill levels—a
level five, a level seven.”
He went from the gunfire of Southeast Asia to the still peace of
Western Europe. While based at RAF Alconbury, north of London, he
roared over England, Scotland, Germany, France and the Netherlands
combing the landscape for errant Russians mid-week in an RF-4. On
weekends, he relaxed with the wind on his face, chugging over hill
and dale in the little Turbulent monoplane he bought from a squadron
mate. Before long, the Barnstormers Flying Circus asked him to join
their troupe. He became a show pilot and his wife Lola, a lovely,
agile Englishwoman, became a wing walker. For three years, on spring,
summer and fall weekends they staged shows at race tracks, on village
greens and in the backyard of titled English estates. Lord Badminton
hired them every year to raise money for the taxes on his property.
“It was entertainment,” Bill says, “Crazy-flying,
streamer-cutting, egg-drops, limbo-flights between two poles. There
were no heros and everybody did their job.” Doing his job has
always been important to Bill. Actually, it seems like he has always
done two or more jobs, and it seems that he has always found a way
to bridge two worlds—England and the US, military and civilian,
small planes and jets.
When he returned to the States he taught ROTC full-time for the Air
Force at Troy State University in Alabama, worked on his civilian
ratings and flew a Citation 500 part-time for a wholesale tire distributor.
In Korea he ran a military radar facility and finished his civilian
instructor ratings for single-engine, multi-engine and instruments.
Back in Texas, at Bergstrom, he taught at the aero club, managed the
airport as Base Operations Officer, and when his marriage broke up,
he became a single parent to his 8-year-old son.
“I took my son everywhere with me,” he says. “I
had a little flight suit made for him in Korea. It said, ‘Top
Gunn.’” Except for a year and a half when Justin lived
with his mother in El Paso and England, Bill raised him by himself.
Meanwhile, his flying and work involvement stepped up. TxDOT’s
predecessor, the Texas Aeronautics Commission hired him to teach a
weekend seminar on military airspace. When he left the Air Force,
after 21 years, he became TACs director of training. He conducted
and taught parts of 11 weekend seminars. Since there were plenty of
hours in his days and weeks he had several other jobs. He also worked
for three other companies. The first one wrote military aviation contracts
at seven Air Force bases. The second one sent him all over the US
in a Geronimo. The third one put him in the right seat of a Saberliner.
During any spare hours he taught flying.
Bill hasn’t done it all, though he seems to have tried. And
he doesn’t know it all, though he may have once. “When
I first got out of flight school I was on an airliner in my dress
blues,” he says. “The stewardess took me up front and
the captain motioned me to sit in the jump seat. I sat there a long
time before he said anything. Then he turned to me with his steely
blue eyes and his weathered face and said, ‘Son, you know more
about aviation right now, then you ever will.’ Then he just
turned back around. I thought about that for years. I think what he
meant was that when you first learn to fly your realm is so tiny that
you feel like you encompass everything in there. But, the more experiences
you have, the more people you meet, the more you hear their stories,
the more you realize there is so much you don’t know.”
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