Authors: Arnold Palmer
Moreover, though, after climbing into the left seat of my plane following a tournament, whether I had won or not, I found it impossible to dwell too long on what had happened, good or bad, on the golf course. Flying the plane demanded my full attention, clear thinking, and an unerring performance under pressure I found almost soothing. Flying a plane was good therapy, perhaps even like a form of meditation for me—I could disappear into the clouds and not have to worry about what I had or hadn’t done on the golf course, what opportunities I had grabbed or chances I’d blown, whom I’d pleased or let down. The phone couldn’t ring. I didn’t have to try to answer impossible questions about whether my putting
would ever regain its brilliance or how it felt to be considered the hottest commercial pitchman in the world.
I was just another pilot in the air, heading home somewhere over America. I found the experience both stimulating and comforting. Ironically, nothing I’ve found except perhaps hitting a golf shot provides me with such instantaneous feedback on the decisions and the moves I execute.
Over the next two years, I put over a thousand hours on that plane, which was the first to wear the special registration number granted to me by the Federal Aviation Administration: 701AP. Just over a year later, in February 1966, I upgraded to my latest capitalist tool—a new Rockwell Jet Commander, which we leased for two years with an option to buy.
There’s no question that private jet travel significantly enhanced my earning potential, though in retrospect I’m sure it also cost me a few tournaments I might otherwise have won, including a couple of majors. Indulging two obsessions sometimes resulted in fatigue, robbed me of needed practice time on the golf course, and generally found me overstretching my physical and mental limits. Relieved of a reliance on commercial air carrier schedules for longer hauls, I literally could be five or six places in a single day. From a business standpoint, this was ideal. By this time, the late sixties, I had Palmer businesses cropping up in at least ten major cities in addition to playing in, on average, about twenty-five tournaments a year and no fewer than twenty exhibition matches. Combined with a growing number of commercial endorsements and the scores of speaking engagements I was asked to do, I probably visited from thirty-five to fifty other cities in a single year.
In my old flying logs I see I was sometimes in the air twenty-six days out of any given month, but the convenience of having a jet also permitted me to sleep in my own bed
most of those nights. A typical non-tournament business day from those years might have gone something like this: I would have breakfast at home with Winnie and the girls, fly down to New Orleans or Jacksonville for an afternoon golf exhibition, maybe stop somewhere en route for a business meeting, then fly home to Latrobe. On lucky days, I actually made it home for dinner with the girls or at least in time to kiss them goodnight before they went to bed.
This leap into the corporate jet age—with an aircraft whose range was two thousand nautical miles and cruised at speeds of five hundred miles per hour—came with a factory test pilot named Darrell Brown, who taught me the ins and outs of flying a jet and eventually became a trusted friend and valued pilot for many years. When Darrell went briefly back to Rockwell in Oklahoma City, as planned, a new copilot named Dick Turner took his place, but he and I had a few rocky moments adjusting to both the new jet technology and to each other. I learned that good chemistry and communication are as essential between pilots as they are between a golfer and his caddie.
I remember vividly one incident early on in our brief association, when the plane was still new to both of us. Dick and I realized that our fuel supply was seriously out of balance—a real no-no in a jet, a formula for disaster—but neither of us had the technical expertise to correct the problem. Fortunately, we got the plane down and went scurrying for the right information, and the problem never reared its ugly head again. Even so, I felt much more confident when, at the time of the Buick tournament in Flint, Michigan, and shortly before my most celebrated collapse at Olympic Club, I phoned Oklahoma City and convinced Darrell to join me on a full-time basis. Darrell, I was pleased to learn, was as happy as I was about this development. We made a good cockpit team.
I suppose in some ways the confidence I felt on the golf
course extended to the way I flew an airplane, with both good and not-so-good consequences. You really can’t do anything halfway in the air. In those early years of flying—with memories of Tony Arch’s foolish stunts emblazoned in my head—I was for the most part a stickler for following the proper procedures for safety’s sake. But I’ll also admit to the occasional bit of youthful hotdogging.
The FAA, it must be said, was a bit more lenient in those days, and far fewer private pilots were in the air then. I’m proud of the fact that I have no blemishes on my flying record, and that I always tried to stay within the rules. But early in my flying career, I confess, I did sometimes give in to the temptation to buzz airfields or golf courses where friends were playing, careful to stay above the 800-foot minimum. The most infamous buzzing incident came in September of 1967 when I took several members of the British Ryder Cup contingent up for a pleasure ride in my Jet Commander during the matches at the Champions Golf Club in Houston. Tony Jacklin, Hugh Boyle, Malcolm Gregson, and George Will all wanted to go for a ride. With them aboard, I circled over the golf course and then took them straight up to 8,000 feet before peeling off and rolling the plane.
A couple of them lost their cookies, and I later had to do some serious explaining to the FAA after a local dairy farmer complained that I was flying below the legal minimum elevation, and, worse, was disturbing his livestock. Lucky for me, an FAA inspector happened to be at the Ryder Cup and confirmed, after a brief investigation, that I had done nothing illegal—just pushed the envelope a bit, as they say.
A year or so later, Darrell and I were approaching Latrobe Airport in my newly leased Lear 24, which I got in early 1968, when the tower informed us that the Powder Puff Derby planes had stopped by. The lady pilots had assembled at the airfield and were anxious to watch us land our latest aircraft.
The Lear, with its sleek aerodynamics and so-called fixed wing, was fast, hot, and extremely nimble, and I felt as if I could do almost anything in it, which may be one reason I would fly it quite contentedly for many years. At the time, there was a great deal of concern about the plane’s safety record, because of a series of unfortunate crashes. My personal view of the situation was that the technology was too new and the aircraft was simply too fast for most private pilots to handle. Jets of its speed capabilities were not commonplace, so there weren’t many experienced pilots available to fly them. A potentially dangerous supply-and-demand problem. Darrell resigned his position as my pilot when I first leased the Lear, citing the plane’s spotty safety record. It was only after I convinced him to fly with me and he saw what the plane could do, how easy to fly and safe it really was, that he agreed to stay with me for a while longer.
Anyway, as we approached the 4,000-foot landing strip at Latrobe, I turned to Darrell and suggested we give the famous lady aviators on the ground a little show. He grinned and nodded. We first made a low drag pass with the flaps down, then climbed rapidly and came around again—rolling the plane and flying past the ladies upside down. I’m told the gallery—I mean to say
audience
—went crazy with pleasure.
I could read you a long list of famous folks who’ve flown with me and signed my plane’s guest book—ranging from my old Palm Springs flying pal Dinah Shore to President and Mrs. George Bush—but maybe the most fun I had flying friends around was with the annual trip I took to the Tournament of Champions in Las Vegas with my doctors from Latrobe Hospital as my guests. For them, it was some needed R and R, a mini–golf vacation, while for me it was a bit like having an extended family along. With all my aerial guests, I’m careful to make sure every comfort they might desire is at hand, including snacks and cocktails (though if they feel the
urge to smoke, I’m always quick to point out management’s official policy, posted on a small sign in the cabin: “If you must smoke, please step outside”).
I’ll never forget one such trip with my doctor friends. My personal physician, Dr. Bob Mazero, an old friend and classmate from Latrobe High, was standing in the aisle just behind the pilot seats holding a martini as we began making our initial approach to Las Vegas over Hoover Dam. Just for fun, I rolled the plane 360 degrees. I executed the maneuver so quickly, Bob didn’t appear to realize what had happened. He blinked with confusion.
“Arnie, what the hell was
that
?” he asked finally, realizing he’d felt something funny. On the other hand, his martini hadn’t lost a drop.
“I don’t know, Bob. What did it feel like?” Seated at the controls, I was the picture of sweet innocence.
“I’m not sure,” he admitted, his brow knitted in puzzlement.
A few seconds later, I rolled the plane the other way and he let out a yelp. “Good heavens. What are you
doing
, Arnie!” He’d figured out that I’d turned him upside down for an instant in the air.
“Nothing, Bob,” I remarked calmly. “Don’t get so excited. I wound you up one way, so I thought I’d just better unwind you.”
The plane erupted with laughter.
N
ot quite so amusing, but happily far rarer, are those tense little moments when something unexpected happens in the air and you must react with as much coolness and levelheaded thinking as you can muster. Fortunately for me and my passengers, flying has been such a major passion of mine that I regularly go through recurrent intensive training every year at Cessna’s Wichita headquarters. It doesn’t hurt that I’ve had a
succession of gifted, experienced pilots flying with me over the years who were great in the clutch. They include, in addition to the ones I’ve mentioned, Lee Lauderback, Charlie Johnson, Ken Gero, Roy Martin, Don Dungey, Woody Woodard, Dan Keating, Cliff Crews, and my current fellow pilot, Pete Luster.
One of the first tense moments I ever had, besides straddling the runway hole with Babe Krinock sitting impassively at my elbow, came when I was practicing touch-and-go landings (briefly touching down and then taking off again) at the Latrobe Airport in my Aero Commander 560F and brought the plane down a few yards shy of the asphalt, dropping the wheels in the soft ground but luckily bouncing over the lip of the runway. That’s the kind of beginner mistake you make only once, one way or another. If you’re lucky enough to survive it, you never make it again.
Another time, a few weeks after the end of the regular Tour season, I flew down to Albany, Georgia, in my Aero Commander to do some hunting and to generally unwind and get away from it all. I was met by a friend and his pilot, who flew us in his older Beechcraft to his 650-acre preserve, putting down on a grass airstrip surrounded by pine forests.
After the hunt (during which I never killed anything—for me the real pleasure was just being in the autumn woods) the pilot asked me if I wanted to fly the plane back to Albany, and I didn’t wait for him to offer a second time. We loaded up, cranked up, and rumbled down to the end of the field for takeoff. About halfway down the field, I noticed that I didn’t feel the plane’s rudder functioning.
“I don’t feel any rudder,” I said loudly to the pilot.
“Aw, it’s fine, Arn,” he replied nonchalantly. “Just give it some power.” And with that, he shoved my hand on the throttle all the way forward. We bounced toward the pine forest and I finally got the plane airborne, either just clipping
the tops of the pines or missing them by the hairs on our terrified heads. Once we were in the air I
knew
the plane had no rudder—the cable had snapped, as it turned out—but, despite a shaky ride that probably terrified the other passengers, I was able to get the craft safely down at the airfield at Albany. When I had switched off the engine, I was sorely tempted to flatten that pilot’s embarrassed red nose. But before I could say a word to him, he was off behind the hangar throwing up!
A few years later, Winnie and I were returning from out west in the Lear very early on a winter morning. It was just after dawn, too early for the tower at Latrobe to be open, as it turned out, so we made a pass over the airfield to make sure it was clear enough to land. During our absence, there had been a large snowfall, but the runway was neatly plowed and looked fine in the morning sunshine. We went around and came in expecting a normal landing—only to touch down on a solid sheet of ice. I felt the Lear begin to skid wildly beneath us. I used the engine’s thrust to regain control of the plane and brought her to a halt in the face of a snowbank at the end of the runway. The plane sustained negligible physical damage. I wish I could say the same thing for the pilot’s ego. I got out to inspect the situation, and I nearly cracked my skull when I slipped on the ice.
Now flash ahead twenty years. Lee Lauderback and I are returning to the mainland from Hawaii, where Lee has met Ed Seay and me on the return leg of a trip to the Far East. Our destination is San Francisco, but halfway across the Pacific from Honolulu to the California coast, we suddenly calculate that, because of the unexpectedly severe head winds, we don’t have enough fuel to make it to San Francisco—we may be extremely fortunate just to get to the California coast. It’s too late to turn back to Hawaii, so we do some swift
course alterations and replot for the closest landing site—Monterey, California.
We had six people on board, including two of Ed’s employees, and, I must say, they were pretty cool under the circumstances. Up front, meanwhile, I was reviewing emergency ditching techniques in my head and could tell from Lee’s tense expression that he was doing the same thing. No one said a word, but there were audible sighs of relief when land came into view and we saw the airstrip at Monterey. The tower suggested that we go around once for our approach, but I told them that wasn’t possible—we needed to come straight in immediately. It was a good thing we did, too. The fuel gauge was registering dead empty, so we took her straight in for a landing. After we were on the ground, I asked the maintenance crew to check the actual supply of fuel left in the tank and they reported there wasn’t enough fuel to have made a second approach. Talk about a close shave.