AircraftOwner Online

Charles Lopez didn’t have much of a choice it seems. Lopez, who answers to “Charlie,” was simply destined to fly.

    As the story goes, Charlie didn’t come into this world in the usual way. And there would be no fables told in the Lopez home of how a stork left baby Charlie, swaddled in a blanket, at his parents’ doorstep.

    Utter nonsense.

    No, Charlie would have his namesake -- famous aviator Charles Lindbergh -- to thank for his special delivery.

    It was June 13, 1927. New York Harbor. A palpable excitement was in the air. Just a couple weeks earlier, America’s new hero Charles Lindbergh made history as the first pilot to successfully fly an airplane across the Atlantic Ocean from New York to Paris. It took him 33 ½ hours.

    Now, the daring young “Lucky Lindy” was coming home. As he made his triumphal arrival in New York Harbor, Lindberg happened to fly directly over the Lopez household in Jersey City, New Jersey.

    With the characteristic deftness of a world class aviator, Lindy successfully dropped a package from his plane onto the Lopez’s roof. It was a brown wicker laundry basket. Inside the basket was a bundle. And that bundle soon would be named Charles Lopez.

    “My mother would tell that story to relatives, neighbors and friends, looking at me adoringly and then pointing to the wicker basket which I slept in as a baby,” recalls the adventurous Lopez, 83, who owns an aerial photography business, Flying Camera, in Miami, FL. “Well, I thought it had to be true. There’s the wicker basket and my name is Charles, after all.”

    Sound reasoning for a toddler. In time, Charlie twigged on to the fact that there were a few holes in that story. Certainly, by the time he was drafted into the United States Army during World War II, he knew the truth.

    And the truth is that little Charlie was indeed born the very day and very hour Lindberg sailed -- on a yacht, not his Spirit of St. Louis -- into Hudson Bay with much fanfare.

    A 22-plane salute flew overhead. Tug boat horns tooted and blared in the harbor. Some 300,000 people gathered at Battery Park in New York City, cheering for their hero. And across the harbor, just three miles away and within earshot of all the hubbub, baby Charlie arrived on the scene, as if he thought all the fuss was for him.

    “Imagine what it must have sounded like to my mother giving birth just a few miles away in her one-bedroom apartment,” writes Lopez, in a story of his own, The Story, which recounts that famed day for his Puerto Rican native mother, Delia. “Surely, she must have thought that this was a great country and that she and her newborn were hardly deserving of so much attention.”

    Turns out, his mother’s tall tale would not only inspire Charlie to eventually take flight in life, but also pen his share of stories -- mostly his own true life aviation adventures.

    “Despite my illustrious beginning, I didn’t learn to fly until my late thirties,” says Lopez, a retired executive for an American pharmaceutical company, who got his wings while on assignment in Puerto Rico. Subsequently, he flew to many of the Caribbean islands.

    Lopez has made up for his late start as a pilot. He’s logged a not-too-shabby 5,500 hours and has lived and flown in several Latin American countries -- including the treacherous terrain of the Andes Mountains in Columbia.

    “Columbia is a rough place to fly,” shares Lopez, who lost several friends to plane crashes in the Andes. “The mountain splits into three separate ranges in Columbia. And in that tropical climate the weather conditions are often unfavorable for flying. It’s just a rough place to fly.”

    Over his 40 some years of flying, Lopez has flown gliders (in Columbia), and in the early 1980’s trained with aerobatic expert Bill Thomas with the United States Aerobatic Team. Thomas was inducted into the Aerobatic Hall of Fame
in 2002.

    “Of course, aerobatic flying forces you to do unusual maneuvers like flying upside down and loops, but that’s excellent training,” says the insatiably curious Lopez. “If you’re ever behind a jet and get caught in turbulence, that can flip you over. So, these things are good to know.”

    Lopez knows what it’s like to come out on the short end of a dangerous flight -- and still live to tell about it. His most harrowing adventure came in early 1967 when he and his then wife, seven months with child, crashed into a mountainous region south of Mexico
City, Mexico.

  Charlie had flown into a cloud formation and emerged to see a forest of green ahead, many of the trees higher than the plane’s cabin.

    “The stall warning bleats intermittently as I try to ease the nose higher,” writes Lopez of the crash in The Cave and the Mountain. “But Fox Echo Victor has given all she can. No longer will she climb to safer altitude. If I persist in forcing a climb, we will stall. The nose will drop abruptly, one wing will fall into a spiraling turn and we will bore a hole into the earth below.“

    As “there is no escaping the pines ahead” both wings are sheared off the plane and the fuselage crashes into the ground, coming to rest at a 45 degree angle. The instrument panel is pressed up against the couple. Gasoline pours into the cabin from the crumpled wing, soaking them. Somehow, Charlie manages to struggle free and eventually free his wife. Locals help them down the mountain.

    “I made all the mistakes that probably could be made that flight,” recalls Lopez, who blames “stupidity” for the mishap. Both he and his wife suffered serious lacerations. Charlie broke a couple ribs. And it would be years before the reoccurring nightmares ceased. In fact, they kept him from climbing back into the pilot’s seat for six years. That is, until a flight instructor friend from Haiti helped him face his fears.

    “He knew of the accident,” explains Lopez. “He asked me to fly with him and once we were up there, he asked me to take the controls while he looked through some flight maps. He was very wise how he did it.

    “He told me ‘All you need is a few hours of this, and a few hours of that.’ That created the bug in me to fly again. But this time I decided to do it right. I got an instrument rating. Learned how to fly gliders in Columbia. And I took aerobatic training.”

    Lopez would spend three years in Mexico, five years Columbia and a few years in Lima, Peru -- meeting interesting people all along the way. In his story The Way of the Raven, Charlie recounts his adventures in Latin America with a good German pilot friend and author, Hans Schneider, for whom Charlie photographed the cover of an autobiographical aviation adventure book.

    “Aviation makes strange bed fellows,” writes Lopez. “Much like other deep-rooted interests shared by a few, a common thread tends to link a diverse group of human beings. Class, race, culture, language or economic barriers soon fade away in the presence of a shared passion.”

    Lopez has crisscrossed the U.S. many times with friends. His furthest jaunt, with a couple pals, took him from Miami to Fairbanks, Alaska. “We flew straight across the lower 48 to California, up the west coast to Vancouver then up to Ketchikan along the water route,” explains Charlie, who has been the subject of a Miami Herald online video entitled “Life’s Little Gifts” -- in which Charlie relates the simple pleasures of arriving at the airfield in the stillness just before dawn and then relishing the peace and beauty of flying. Says Charlie: “You just feel good to be alive.”

    Aside from the thrill of flying, Charlie’s other passion is photography.

    “I was born with a camera in my hand,” says Charlie, inadvertently adding to the wicker basket lore. “From as early as I can remember, I liked taking pictures. I used have one of those Brownie cameras as a kid.”

    These days the easy-going adventurer takes to the air regularly, sometimes simply for the joy of it and other times to shoot often breath-taking aerial shots of the Miami skyline for his Flying Camera business he started in the 1980’s. He has more than 50,000 pictures stored
on discs.

    When Charlie turned 80 a few years ago, he joined the ranks of the United Flying Octogenarians (UFO) -- a group of some 650 pilots worldwide who have all flown as pilot in command on or past their 80th birthday.

    Charlie clearly tries to remember and live by a simple truth he touches on in one of his stories: It’s not so much the destination that counts, but the journey. And to think that journey all started in a simple wicker basket and with his mother’s rich imagination.

    “I still like the story,” writes Charlie in The Story. “It beats the stork thing hands down. And better still, it led me down the path of flying.”

    Charles Lindbergh would be proud.

   Once again, live tower chatter is resounding within the old control tower of the famous Bader Field general aviation airport of Atlantic City, NJ.

    How’s that? No, Bader Field, also known as Atlantic City Municipal Airport, hasn’t reopened for business. Just its control tower. Thanks to the efforts of the Naval Air Station Wildwood Aviation Museum at the Cape May Airport, in New Jersey, and anonymous donations to the tune of $50,000, that once worn, rusted radio control tower circa 1949, has been fully restored and outfitted as a key addition to the museum’s interactive educational arsenal.

    “What better way to explain what an air traffic control tower is than taking people up to a real air traffic control tower?” asks Bruce A. Fournier, educator for NAS Wildwood Aviation Museum www.usnasw.org.

    The Bader Field Tower is now housed within the museum’s giant wooden hangar along with a multitude of classic flying machines and displays. The tower is equipped with radar and weather scan computer capability as well as live radio feeds from airport towers across the country.

    To boot, within a month or so, Fournier says, the museum will have installed a wireless radio communication system in the tower that will enable patrons to communicate with other museum goers in one of four different aircraft in the museum’s hangar -- including a couple of Huey helicopters.

    “The tower will be a lot of fun,” continued Fournier. “Kids love simply walking up to the top to check out the view. More importantly, we will have displays below the tower to teach the history of air traffic control and the significance of the Bader Field (Atlantic City, NJ) Tower. “

    Both the Bader Field airport and tower had seen better days. The control tower had been shut down in the mid to late 1980’s, according to reports. It would be nearly another 20 years before the historically significant airport closed up for good in September of 2006. Bader Field of Atlantic City, which opened in 1910 and was first commissioned for passenger service in 1911, was an integral part of this country’s aviation record.

    Bader holds the distinction as this nation’s first municipal airport to serve both land and seaplanes. And every U.S. President from Theodore Roosevelt through Gerald Ford, at some point in their administration, flew into Atlantic City’s Bader Field. Charles Lindbergh flew his famous custom-built, single engine monoplane, the Spirit of St. Louis, into Bader. And for decades, Bader field was part of the well-known Powder Puff Derbies.

    Other famous names are linked with the airport, as well. Admiral Robert E. Perry, who discovered the North Pole, was a member of the committee that sponsored the airport. In 1941, one week before Pearl Harbor, this country’s first Civil Air Patrol (CAP) was founded at Bader Field.

    Fortunately, before the tower could be trashed or forgotten, it was salvaged by Dr. Joseph E. Salvatore, founder and chairman of NASW Foundation, which operates the museum. About a year an half ago, the tower arrived at the museum on a flatbed truck, disassembled. A catwalk and steel girders were stacked separately from the control section. Earlier this year, the museum unveiled the fully-restored Bader Field control tower, cleaned up, painted and sporting a red and white checkered body.

    “We realize that students today learn differently than years ago,” said Fournier. “Children want to be active, hands on learners. They want to see, hear, touch and feel what is going on. The tower will be a great addition to our interactive area.”

    During the waning days of May, 2nd graders from Pilgrim Academy in Galloway Township, just north of Atlantic City visited the museum on a class trip. Some students enjoyed playing air traffic controller and maneuvering the old controls that are no longer functional, but fire the imagination. “Wow, this is awesome,” said a second grader as he got a look inside the control tower.

    Some 2nd graders were surprised by the height and stayed close to the tower on the inside of the “cat walk” while others enjoyed the view and took pictures.  

    “It’s hard to get the older students to come down, but we have to give others a chance to see what is up there,” commented Fournier, who did his best to keep the future aviators moving along. “They want to know what each piece of equipment is, what it does and how to operate it!”