Al Ueltschi: From Barnstormer To Billionaire by Vero Beach Magazine

After making the skies safer, Al Ueltschi is helping to alleviate Third World blindness.

From Barnstormer To Billionaire

After making the skies safer, Al Ueltschi is helping to alleviate Third World blindness.

from barnstormer to billionaire jon pine

by John Parkyn

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Ninety-year-old Vero Beach resident Al Ueltschi stands outside FlightSafety’s Flight Academy at the Vero Beach Municipal Airport. From a tiny, 200-square-foot office at LaGuardia Airport in New York, he built FlightSafety into the world’s largest and most respected pilottraining organization.

lbert Lee Ueltschi first decided he was going to become a pilot on May 21, 1927. Although he turns 90 this month, he still remembers the date because it was the day Charles Lindbergh landed in Paris, becoming the first man to fly the Atlantic. For two days young Al had been glued to the family radio as one breathless report after another followed the flight of The Spirit of St. Louis from the moment it left Long Island, N.Y., until its arrival 33 hours, 30 minutes and 29.8 seconds later at Le Bourget Airport. “I was just 10 years old, and Lindbergh was my hero from that moment on,” says Ueltschi (pronounced Vool-shee). “All I could think about was becoming a flier like him.” Al had first dreamed of learning to fly even earlier, around the age of 5. “There weren’t many planes in Kentucky in those days,” he says, “but every one I saw fascinated me. I remember walking out of my schoolhouse, which was set on a hill, and gazing down into the valley thinking, this is what a pilot must see.” There was nothing in Albert Ueltschi’s background to suggest that he would one day become an aviation legend. The son of Swiss immigrants who had settled as dairy farmers in a rural area of Kentucky near Frankfort, the state capital, he had grown up on the farm, the youngest of Robert and Lena Ueltschi’s brood of five sons and two daughters. Like most farmers in the financially precarious 1920s and ’30s, the Ueltschi family had little money to show for their efforts. “We’d get up before dawn, and, except for a couple of breaks for eating, wouldn’t stop until sundown,” Al recalls. “And we’d do that seven days a week because dairy cows don’t take the weekends off.”

The seventh child of Swiss immigrants, Al was raised on a farm in Kentucky. Here, he is seen perched between his parents, Robert and Lena Ueltschi, with his six older siblings grouped behind.

The Ueltschi farmhouse was located in the bluegrass hills of Kentucky a short distance from the state capital, Frankfort.

As a boy, Al got stuck with menial tasks around the farm that his older siblings passed on to him. This included milking the cows and cleaning up manure.

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Al is seen second from right in this photo, taken when he was a flying instructor for the Queen City Flying Service. He fell out of the Waco plane behind him while flying upside down at 3,500 feet.

As the youngest member of the family, Al got the menial jobs that his older siblings no longer wanted to do. As well as milking the cows, he was in charge of cleaning up the manure. Later in the morning, he would ride into town with his brothers to leave bottles of milk at customers’ doors. As they headed back to the farm, his brothers would drop him off at the local school. “It was a one-room schoolhouse,” he remembers. “One teacher taught all eight grades, and the older kids were expected to help with the younger ones.” When Al announced his intention of becoming a pilot, it was met with derision by his siblings and a joke by his quick-witted father that has become part of family lore. “Become a pilot?” said his dad. “But, Al, you’re already a pilot.” When he saw his son’s puzzled stare, Robert Ueltschi laughed and said, “Well, after you clean out the stalls, you take the manure and you pile it here and you pile it there. See, you are a pile-it.”

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Always the entrepreneur, Al became a barnstormer at age 20, putting on aerobatic displays and taking locals for a ride at weekends. During the week he made money by running a hamburger stand.

t 16, Al figured it was time to start turning his dream into reality. He was now old enough to go to one of the newfangled flying schools, but his parents couldn’t afford it. So he decided to raise the money himself. On his visits to Frankfort, he had noticed the crowds who lined up for hamburgers at White Castle, a predecessor of today’s fast-food chains. Figuring he might get the same response on the other, less competitive side of the Kentucky River, he opened a small, hole-in-the-wall hamburger joint. “I had a fridge, a grill and seven stools,” he recalls. “I called it the Little Hawk because it sounded vaguely airplane-like. I even provided a volume discount—one burger for 10 cents, a

With 42 learning centers and 1,200 professional instructors, Al Ueltschi’s FlightSafety teaches safe piloting to more students than any other organization. Seen here is a maintenance training classroom at the FlightSafety center in West Palm Beach.

dozen for a dollar—and in the evenings, I got other school kids to help me.” Within a year, Al had expanded his little empire to three hamburger stands and had enrolled at a local flying school. When he was 18 he briefly attended the University of Kentucky, but found that his studies interfered with his flying lessons and quit after a few months. In 1937, at age 20, he sold his burger business and began flying full-time. As his flying skills improved, Al decided it was time to buy his own plane. Once again, he was faced with the problem of how to pay for it. With some trepidation, he approached a local bank president who had been a customer at his hamburger stand; impressed with the young man’s business acumen, the banker agreed to lend him $3,500 without collateral. It was the exact sum Al needed to buy a Waco open-cockpit biplane fitted with an old World War I engine, the cheapest aircraft he could find. Once again, the youngster’s entrepreneurial spirit carried him through. To pay off the loan, he began taking local folks up for a ride. “I charged a dollar for adults, 50 cents for kids,” he recalls. “As the Waco was a two-seater I could only take one at a time, so I’d strap them in, lift off, fly around the field and land. It took only a few minutes but since none of them had ever been in a plane before, they were quite satisfied.” This was the age of the barnstormer, and Al soon began playing the role to the hilt. At weekends he attended local

One of FlightSafety’s newest campuses is located in Farnborough, England, which was opened last year. The planes flying in formation above the building were performing at the world-famous Farnborough Air Show.

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FlightSafety owns more flight simulators than any other organization in the world–some 230. Seen here, a student undergoes training in a simulator for the LearJet 60 at the company’s learning center in Tucson, Ariz.

A FlightSafety instructor watches as a student takes over the controls of this Cessna Citation CJ2 simulator at the campus in Wichita, Kan.

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air shows, putting on an aerobatics display that brought screams of disbelief from the crowds below. He dressed to fit the role of a flying ace with white flying helmet, white suit and goggles. “I think folks came out to see if the fool kid would kill himself,” he says. “And like a fool, on several occasions I almost obliged.” Within months his daring aerobatics were noted by a Cincinnati aviation firm, the Queen City Flying

Service, who were interested in using him as a flying instructor. “There was a huge demand at the time for pilots who could perform aerobatics,“ he says. “So at Queen City I taught my students how to fly upside down, spin and dive.” Like most young fliers, Al believed he was immortal. But while with Queen City he learned how risky flying those creaky, open-cockpit biplanes could be. While teaching a

This simulator for the Global Express corporate jet is based in Wilmington, Del.

student to fly upside down at 3,500 feet, Al’s seat broke from its moorings in the rear cockpit. “Suddenly I saw that the airplane was way above me, and I realized I was falling still strapped to my seat. And as long as I was in the seat there was no way I could use my parachute.” He managed to free himself from the falling chair but his thick flying gloves made pulling the ripcord impossible, so a few more seconds

From the outside, simulators resemble a kind of alien flying pod. Pictured here are two Dassault Falcon simulators at Teterboro, N.J.

flashed by as he tore off his gloves. By now he was hurtling down towards a patch of green Ohio farmland. When he was about 150 feet from the ground, the parachute finally inflated, breaking his fall enough to save his life. “Fortunately, I landed on my feet in a briar patch,” he recalls. “If I’d landed on my head I wouldn’t be talking to you now.”

n 1941, Al decided he had had enough of aerobatics. Clearly, it was time to take his career seriously, which meant landing a job with an airline. He made a list of the 10 airlines who might offer him a position as a pilot, with Pan American at No. 1 and Northeast Airlines at No. 10. “I wrote to all of them,” he says. “But I only heard from Northeast.” On the day Al arrived in Boston to take up his job with the airline, he received a telegram from Pan American offering him an interview in Miami. “I had a certain position with Northeast and only the offer of an interview with Pan Am, but I didn’t hesitate,” he says. Climbing aboard his old Chevy, he drove the 1,500 miles from Boston to Miami non-stop.

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This Cessna Citation CJ2 simulator is based at the learning center in Wichita. The interior is shown on the facing page.

After a training session in a simulator, a FlightSafety student studies a replay of his work with comments by the instructor.

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“After Pan Am hired me I became something of a general assignment pilot,” he recalls. “I worked in the training department for a while, then crewed briefly on the Clipper flying boats, where my chief responsibility was to crawl into the bow and raise and lower the anchor.” Subsequently, he became an instructor at the airline’s Miami base, and it was here that he was recommended by his boss to Pan Am founder and chairman Juan Trippe, who was looking for a personal pilot. “Under the regulations of those days, Pan Am could fly anywhere in the world except the United States,” Al explains. “Trippe was constantly attending business conferences all over America and had no desire to fly on a competitive carrier. So he bought his own twin-engined Lockheed Electra and started looking for a pilot among the ranks of his own airline.” Al’s assignment was for six months; it lasted a quartercentury. During those years, he flew Trippe and his many guests to meetings all over the country. It was fascinating work because, as head of America’s most prestigious

airline, Trippe frequently entertained international celebrities aboard his plane, among them Winston Churchill, Dwight Eisenhower, Gen. George Marshall and Francis Cardinal Spellman. Al’s biggest thrill came quite unexpectedly when Trippe’s guest was his boyhood hero, Charles Lindbergh. “I flew Trippe and Lindbergh to Seattle for a conference with executives at Boeing,” Al recalls. “It was an important meeting because it resulted in Pan Am signing a contract for 20 of the new 707 jets that would become Boeing’s first jet aircraft. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, it was the beginning of the Jet Age.”

uring his early years as Juan Trippe’s personal pilot, a new idea had begun forming in Al Ueltschi’s mind. “I was one of the first corporate pilots,” he says. “But now more and more firms were buying surplus military planes and converting them into corporate aircraft; they would then hire their own pilots. “Unlike the big airlines, which had their own training

schools, these corporate guys had little or no training on the planes they were being hired to fly. It was a dangerous situation at best, and I kept thinking, what if I started a training school for corporate pilots?” In 1951, 10 years after he joined Pan Am, Al decided to put his idea to the test. Cautiously, he began in the smallest way possible. “I explained the concept to Mr. Trippe and asked if I could run the school in my spare time so I could keep my job as his pilot,” Al says. “He must have been pretty happy with me because he said yes. So I took a $15,000 mortgage on my house and opened a tiny office next to the Pan Am base at LaGuardia Airport in New York. It was literally a 200-square-foot cubbyhole with just enough room for me and a secretary.”

ather grandly, Al called his new company FlightSafety International. Fortunately, it began living up to its name almost from the start. “Not only corporate pilots but pilots working for small regional airlines were looking for somewhere to hone their skills and learn about new flying techniques and new aircraft,” he says. As the applications poured in, Al realized he would need a steady roster of instructors. Again, he proceeded with caution. “Rather than take on a full-time staff I persuaded a number of Pan Am and United pilots to moonlight with FlightSafety,” he says. “They were thankful for the extra income, and where else could I have found such highly qualified teachers?” The flight instruction took place in the client’s aircraft, with additional training performed on instrument trainers rented by the hour from United Airlines. For 17 years, Al combined his two

The Ueltschi family in 1955, when Al was still flying for Pan Am and running FlightSafety on the side. From left: Nancy, Anne and Al, with wife Eileen holding baby Patricia. Son Jim, who now lives in Vero Beach, is sitting on the floor. In 1974, Eileen died after a long battle with rheumatoid arthritis.

careers, as personal pilot for Juan Trippe and as president of FlightSafety. Living on his Pan Am salary, he poured his profits back into the business. In less than 10 years FlightSafety had grown from its tiny office at LaGuardia to the largest pilot-training school in the world. Inevitably, as the company expanded, Al found it more and

more difficult to give his full attention to both jobs. At age 50, after 25 years as Trippe’s pilot, he decided the time had come to say farewell to Pan Am. It was not entirely a coincidence that his retirement occurred just as Juan Trippe made the decision to step down as head of the airline he had founded 40 years earlier.

Al, center, with grandson Jim Jr. and daughter-in-law Jean, is seen alongside the Orbis DC-10 “flying hospital” that takes volunteer ophthalmologists all over the world on a mission to help cure blindness in Third World countries.

Grandson Jim Jr., Al and son Jim in the fully equipped operating room aboard the Orbis DC-10.

That same year, 1968, Al Ueltschi took FlightSafety International public and launched a massive expansion program. Today, the company operates 42 centers in the U.S., Canada, France and the U.K. where 1,200 professional instructors train some 65,000 pilots annually. It also designs its own highly sophisticated simulators– more than 230 at last count. One of the company’s most unusual training centers is in Vero Beach, where the FlightSafety Academy teaches the basic ABCs of flying. It’s the only FlightSafety school that accepts novice pilots. “I chose Vero Beach because there was land available alongside the municipal airport and the Piper factory was next door,” Al says. In 1996, 45 years after he founded the company, Al, now nearly 80, sold FlightSafety to Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway for $1.5 billion. Overnight, he joined the exclusive list of America’s 400-

plus billionaires. When asked why he had worked so hard for so many years, he said modestly, “I had four children, and I had to send them through school.”

l had married the former Eileen Healy in June 1944 when he was 27. The couple met while Eileen was working as a flight attendant — “stewardess” in those days—for American Airlines. Over the next 10 years, she would give birth to three girls and a boy. Their son, Jim, who lives with his wife Jean in Vero Beach, for a time was in charge of the FlightSafety Academy here. Al’s oldest, Anne, now lives in Virginia; middle daughter Nancy lives in Hawaii with her four children, and the youngest, Patricia lives in New Hampshire. Today, he is grandfather to six grandsons and six granddaughters, and two great-grandchildren. Sadly, Eileen did not live to see her grandchildren grow up. She died in 1974 after a desperate battle with rheumatoid arthritis. “It was terrible to see someone you loved suffering in that way,” Al says. “We went to all the best doctors, but no one could help.” Six years earlier, shortly after he retired from Pan Am, Al and Eileen had built a four-bedroom, oceanfront home in Vero Beach. They already had a home in Connecticut but chose Indian River County as their winter hideaway. “We always loved Vero because it’s so secluded,” Al says. Today, 33 years after his wife’s death, he keeps fit with a regimen that includes getting up at 4:30 a.m. to do a halfhour of aerobics. He still lives from November through April in the modest home that he and Eileen built in 1968 and drives a Ford Taurus. Though he is more responsible for the safety of corporate aviation than any man alive, he does not own a corporate jet of his own, preferring to fly the commercial airlines.

t 90 one might expect that this would be the end of the Albert Ueltschi story. But it’s not. Since 1982, he has been the chairman of Orbis International, a non-profit organization whose sole aim is to reduce Third World blindness by training local ophthalmologists in a unique “flying eye” hospital. The idea for Orbis began in the mid-1970s when Juan Trippe was approached by Dr. David Paton, head of ophthalmology at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. Paton wanted to know if it was feasible for an operating room to be accommodated inside a commercial jet. Millions of people were losing their sight unnecessarily all over Africa and such countries as China, India, Pakistan

and Vietnam, Paton explained. To help bring some relief, he had conceived the idea of a flying hospital so that local ophthalmologists could watch intricate eye surgery being performed, then hone their own skills on board the same aircraft under the supervision of the visiting doctors. Intrigued, Trippe called in Al who flew to Houston to watch Paton perform a surgery. After studying the dimensions of the operating room, Al concluded that a similar room could indeed be adapted to the fuselage of a conventional passenger jet. With Trippe’s encouragement, Al began working with Paton to make the dream come true, buying an old United Airlines DC-8 for $300,000. Other airlines heard about the humanitarian project and agreed to provide supplies and services for free. After several years, the DC-8 was replaced by a larger DC-10 which is a marvel of modern technology. It uses local water—the same polluted water that frequently is the cause of blindness—but has an onboard system that purifies it.

ince 1982, when the flying hospital took off on its first mission, more than 124,000 doctors, nurses and other health-care workers have enhanced their skills through Orbis programs. The plane only visits areas that have no hospitals. A minimum of three weeks is spent in each location so that the volunteer eye surgeons have time to perform a series of surgeries before an audience of local physicians, then assist the local doctors perform surgeries of their own. In the past year, the flying hospital has visited India, Sudan, Uzbekistan and nine other countries where ophthalmologic treatment is scarce. As the volunteer surgeons work in the plane’s operating room, local physicians sit in what would normally be the first-class section watching the procedure on TV screens and asking questions through an audio hookup. At the end of each trip, the crew leaves behind videocassettes so that more doctors can be trained. By harnessing the power of the Internet, Orbis has also established Cyber-Sight, an innovative program that enables ophthalmologists to provide advice on patients to doctors in Third World countries. To date, some 2,000 such “e-consultations” have been conducted. “It’s the old adage,” says Al. “Don’t give a hungry man a fish. Teach him how to fish.” There is another adage that Al Ueltschi likes to use when he is asked the secret of his success. “We were in the right place at the right time with the right stuff,” he says, smiling. “To some that might seem like we were pretty smart. But the old saying about ‘being lucky whenever possible’ certainly had a lot to do with it.” `