A Lifetime in the Sky

Wheat dances in the slightest breeze creating a golden ocean that gently sways. The horizon of the South Dakota farm fields touches the June sky which is painted with the colors of pinks, oranges and yellows. The clouds create brush strokes in the air that add texture to the sunrise. The aroma of dew fills the air. The morning is quiet as it is still early. All is silent. All is peaceful.

Birds start chirping their music as if they were the first of the land to be up on this beautiful summer daybreak. Sudden rumbles of a crop-dusting plane engine firing cut through the organic sounds as the manmade engine overpowers the softness of nature.

Morris Riggins, a crop duster, has already started his day at 3 a.m., preparing to spray summer crops. He takes advantage of these peaceful mornings as timing out the conditions for a perfect spray run is of the essence as each element needs to be matched. The air cannot be too hot, nor too windy, as this will create a drift in the pesticides.

He taxis on the golden-covered runway as the sun peaks over the horizon line, coating everything it touches with its bright rays. The engine roars as it starts to pick up speed. Within seconds the black rubber wheels are free from touching the pavement. The wings are no longer casting a shadow over the airport, but rather, over the golden ocean of farm fields. Within 15 feet from the ground, he creates flight routes of back and forth patterns. His mornings and evenings, when the air is cooler, are filled with this serenity of just him and his plane.

Riggins' lifestyle is not just limited to crop dusting. He has years of experience in other forms of flying. His life has revolved around aviation since he was young and being a pilot has been part of his family for generations.

“In 1917, my great uncle was actually an Army fighter pilot, and they trained him in WWI and sent him to Europe on a boat,” Riggins said. “By the time he got to Europe the war was over, so they turned him around and sent him home. So, he went back to Havre, Montana, and as soon as he could afford it, he bought an airplane and had airplanes for the rest of his life.”

From here, the chain of pilots in the Riggins family started and his father became involved in the aviation lifestyle as well.

“When my dad was old enough, he was working for him on his ranch and so he taught dad how to fly,” Riggins said. “World War Two come along and then dad was a flight instructor for the Army in World War Two. After that, he got into crop spraying and flying lessons.”

If it were not for his father choosing to be a pilot for his career, Riggins may never have gone into aviation.

“My dad had a sheep ranch, and I am glad he got rid of the sheep before I come along,” Riggins said. “I am pretty sure I would be a sheep rancher right now because whatever my dad was doing was fine with me, but yeah, flying worked out a lot better than tending sheep.”

Some of Riggins’ first memories involve flying, as his father introduced him to being in the cockpit as a child.

“I remember sitting on my dad’s lap and flying the Cherokee because I couldn’t reach the rudder pedals,” Riggins said. “But I could sit on his lap and use the control wheel. So, that’s my first memory was sitting on his lap and flying.”

Just as his uncle taught Riggins’ father how to fly, so too, did his father teach him to fly as well.

“I come around in 1960 and he taught me to fly,” Riggins said. “On my birthday, Christmas Eve in 1976, I did my first solo in the Super Cub that we still own and both of my sons did their first solos in the same airplane.”

Riggins’ career in flying was more than just a job but a passion. With this, he created a business where he would be involved with aviation year-round.

“I wanted to be a spray pilot and that is all I really wanted to be, but we only spray crops three… four months out of the year,” Riggins said. “So, I became a flight instructor and a mechanic so I could make money for the rest of the year.”

After this achievement, he started to use his pilot’s license to start making money and earning other certifications for his portfolio.

“I got my commercial certificate when I was eighteen and that summer I got to spray,” Riggins said. “When I graduated from high school, I went to mechanic school in Watertown and that is where I got my CFI that year in ‘79. So, each year I added another rating like a multi-engine rating, multi-engine instructor, glider instructor and over the years I just kept adding stuff…I have all the fixed-wing flight instructor certificates and rotorcraft helicopter.”

The decision to explore other forms of flying led to opportunities for Riggins to open a flight school teaching students not just from the South Dakota region, but to people nationally and internationally.

This has become a possibility to get his business known through word of mouth and creating connections.

“We’ve done a lot of people from Australia,” Riggins said. “15 years ago, I checked ride a kid from Australia and aviation over the world is a small community, but a country like Australia is really small so he went home and told his dad, and his dad’s friend come. We just do a whole ton of people from all over the world now.”

Riggins Flight Service has continued to maintain traction and popularity in the aviation world creating a full schedule for years for pilots receiving certifications through Riggins.

“Last year we taught like 300 people to fly here,” Riggins said. “We do all the way from private to commercial and multi-engine instrument and we do float planes, too.”

Riggins has continued to utilize the old ways of how he teaches his students compared to other flight schools.

“We still teach as if it were the 50s or 60s stick and rudder skills,” Riggins said. “So, we don’t really spend a lot of time, especially for the beginning students teaching them how to run fancy radios and fancy instruments, but we actually want them to learn how to fly the airplane. Later on in their career, when they upgrade to a fancier airplane they will learn how to run an autopilot. None of our planes have autopilot.”

Riggins has also established traditions for his students that other flight instructing schools do not do, which makes his school unique. He creates memorable times with his students such as creating souvenirs out of their shirts when they solo.

“Nobody really knows the origin of it but the story that seems the most plausible was that in the early days in the old biplanes, the flight instructor didn’t have an intercom and you really couldn’t talk to your students so you had to tug at their shirt tale to get his attention,” Riggins said. “So, from what I understand they would cut the shirt tale end off because there was no flight instructor to tug at your shirt anymore.”

This has led to all of his students hanging their cut shirt tales on his wall which dates back to the 90s. Each shirt is signed and has a story associated with it.

“We still do that tradition here,” Riggins said. “When you do your first solo, we cut your shirt off. You sign it and we put it on our wall. Very seldom do we give the shirt back to the student. They can come back and look at it. It’s an old tradition that old flight schools keep up.”

In addition to flight instructing and crop dusting, Riggins has branched out to other forms of flying across the country.

“I worked in Alaska for one whole summer, and I did survey flights on the north slope and stayed at the oil camp,” Riggins said. “And part of my job in the fall in the hunting season was going on I would take hunters up in the mountains and drop them off in the mountains and pick them up two…three…five days later.”

In addition to Alaska, Riggins has experienced a range of locations where he has offered his flying expertise.

“I’ve flown a little in Canada, a little bit in New Mexico, Central America and Mexico,” Riggins said. “In like Mexico, Canada, Central America, that was for a freight operation.”

In addition to flying charter and freight, Riggins also utilized his flying for entertainment purposes and showcased his flying skills as an acrobat pilot for Red Barons.

“There are not really too many people who are professional mechanics and professional pilots, there are very few of us who do that also,” Riggins said.

This dual aspect of aviation work has been an element he has enjoyed since he was young as he built things growing up and fixed items.

“I was a mechanic before I was a pilot,” Riggins said. “I would drive my dad nuts because for Christmas I would get a new toy or a bicycle and I would take it apart before I would play with it. He would ask me ‘Why are taking a brand-new bicycle apart?’ and I would say, ‘I don’t know, I can’t stop myself.’ So, I would tell everybody that I was a mechanic before I was anything because I was literally taking things apart as long as I could remember.”

“I did that for six years, two years full-time and four years part-time,” Riggins said. “That was seasonal, too, flying those Stearmans. We did airshows, we did promotional stuff for Red Baron’s Pizza.”

All of these experiences throughout his life in flying have added to thousands of hours in the air—doubling in hours than most pilots would attempt to work toward.

“I have over 40,000 hours. There are not too many people with those hours and I tell people, ‘try to catch me,’” Riggins said. “An airline pilot career would probably have 20,000 hours. Some other careers are kind of hard to say, nobody is a flight instructor all their life, they usually go on to become a charter pilot. But yeah, over 40,000 is an overachiever—not too many people in the world can say that.”

When he is not flying, Riggins is utilizing his skills in mechanics and fixing airplanes. This is also an aspect that he enjoys that is a part of his career.

Having this skill of being able to fix planes led to a collection of planes that he has at his airport that he utilizes for his business in crop dusting and flight instructing.

“We have forty planes,” Riggins said. “Everything we have we use in the business somehow, well besides the Stearman we bought for fun and the helicopter we bought for fun, but everything else there is a purpose. We don’t do as much tailwind anymore so we have six Cubs and I don’t think we will ever really sell any of them because I like Cubs so much. But yeah, there is always a purpose in mind when I buy something.”

In addition to collecting airplanes, Riggins also rebuilds and fixes airplanes. This was a major part of his business before he made instructing a full-time business.

“Some of my better airplanes when the weather was bad, I would build a Piper Cub or Champ or a fabric airplane,” Riggins said. “I would rebuild a couple three in the winter because we didn’t have that many students because if I taught ten or twenty a year to fly that would be a big thing for us so I spent a lot of time fixing stuff which I really enjoy.”

This part of his business is something that Riggins does as he continues to work on airplanes.

“I still sneak out early in the morning and I have a project and I do something,” Riggins said. “It’s my therapy. I work in the shop every day and I fly every day. If it deals with either airplanes or motorcycles, I'm there to work on it.”

With each of his planes, he takes care of them, allowing them to continue to fly and operate even with their age.

“Most of our planes are from the 60s and 70s and if you closed your eyes and looked on my ramp you would swear it was 1970 because my newest plane is from 1974,” Riggins said. “We take care of them better than we do our cars.”

This aviation lifestyle that Riggins chose to pursue for his career and passion is something that most people cannot say they can do or are associated with.

“For spray pilots, there are only four thousand spray pilots in the United States out of the millions that live in the United States,” Riggins said. “As a pilot examiner, there are only seven hundred and fifty of us pilot examiners, so I seem to gravitate towards the section that there are fewer of. Spraying is more dangerous than the rest of it so that has something to do with it and as a pilot examiner I got kind of lucky I was at the right place at the right time, and they needed an examiner.”

This way of life has been part of who Riggins is and will be. The thousands of hours in the sky and the shop have created a lifetime of doing his passion—aviation.

“I tell people it's better than having a real job,” Riggins said. “I still enjoy flying and sometimes I just take one of the cubs up and fly it by myself and fly around.”

Morris Riggins