Unusual Attitudes: A Big Irish Family

They were a big Irish family in Hamilton, Ohio. I’m not sure if Bernie or Joe was the oldest, but Art and Bill came along about 10 years later with another brother and three sisters somewhere in between. In 1929, after a neighboring farmer, “Pop” Muhlburger, taught the two oldest boys to fly in his Waco 10, the Hogan family bought both Muhlburger’s farm and the Waco. By the early 1930s, Art and Bill were flying and their sisters were helping run what had now become an airport. To paraphrase Gill Robb Wilson’s poem, the springing turf of that green meadow became a catapult from which, 86 years later, men are still leaping.

The Hogans certainly weren’t the only guys to create an airport out of farmland in the 1930s, but they were unique — vastly different from one another in personality but closely knit, skillful and determined to make it work. They were fiercely independent, full of life and open to new ideas, sometimes rough on the surface but always friendly. They were successful in the business for the next 50 years. I wish they could have withstood the pressures and financial incentives to sell the iconic airport to the politicians, but, by the 1980s, they were aging, and the Hogan clan had grown with dozens of grandkids and great-grandkids. The airport lies in a mushrooming urban area northwest of Cincinnati, and I guess it needed federal and state dollars to survive and grow.

The brothers were all mechanics as well as pilots, but when I met them Bernie ran the shop while Joe, Art and Bill did the flying. I think I first landed there in the mid-’60s in a derelict, 65 hp J-3 Cub and tried to impress a big, redheaded guy on the ramp by holding it down on the runway and hauling it into a pathetic chandelle on takeoff. When the engine quit in the climbing turn and I dead-sticked it back, Bill came out to drag the Cub and me off the runway. He looked both of us over suspiciously and sumped some fuel. When rather large flecks of orange (rust) dribbled out, he didn’t need to say anything; his look left no doubt that he was less than impressed with either me or the airplane.

A few years later, I got a multiengine rating from Art, an examiner, in an Aztec — and that too was a little irregular. My friend Mike Devanney had brought the airplane to Cincinnati for a few days, but it actually belonged to a nonflying business associate in Memphis. He (Mike, not the owner) thought it was a great opportunity, and I thought flying an Aztec for gas was a splendid idea, so after aviating for a couple of hours with Mike, I wheedled a sign-off from a CFI friend and took the Aztec to Art for a check ride.

After an extensive preflight, he said, “Airplane looks OK, but what about paperwork and the manual?”

“Uh, Mr. Hogan, I’m positive everything’s legal, but, well, I think all that stuff’s in Memphis.”

There was considerable foot shuffling, head scratching and grumbling, but finally Art said, “I guess it doesn’t need paper to make it fly,” and off we went.

If you hadn’t already guessed, I loved all four of them. But Bill, the youngest and the burley redhead, was the most colorful. In 1963, he and a partner acquired two projects — a rare P-51H rescued from the front yard of some VFW post and an equally rare 1929 Taperwing Waco found in a barn. The “skunk works” was in the back of a big 55-foot-wide hangar the brothers had built by making 2,500 cement blocks out of the sand and gravel on the field. Drop in any evening and you’d find kids, grandkids and kibitzers, parts and tools all over, manuals and diagrams spread out on the wings and a big galvanized trash can iced down with beer.

Bill Hogan could literally fly (or fix) anything, and, after both airplanes were flying two years later, he performed in airshows all over the Midwest. His signature act was extended inverted flight in the Waco, after he figured out how to keep the engine running, and a five-snap-rolls-in-a-row routine. At some point in those years, as an FAA inspector, I issued his aerobatic competency card, and it was hard for either of us to keep a straight face — the dingbat girl in the derelict Cub was now a bureaucratic (I hope not) expert evaluating Bill’s competency in a P-51!

The Taperwing came out of the Waco factory in nearby Troy, Ohio, in 1929 with a 225 hp Wright J-5 engine — the same one used by Lindbergh to cross the Atlantic. Bill installed a Wright J-6 with a supercharger that nearly doubled the horsepower (to 440) and made it a splendid aerobatic airplane. But the engine quit when he flew it upside down for any length of time, and, worse, it wouldn’t restart when he rolled back level. An electric fuel pump didn’t solve the problem, so he put in a header tank with just a few gallons of fuel. Now the fuel line to the engine had enough to keep the engine running while upside down. So there was a 60-gallon fuselage tank along with two 10-gallon tanks in the upper-wing center section (rarely used because they made the airplane too heavy for aerobatics) and the header tank with just a few gallons. A three-position fuel selector on the cockpit floor allowed the pilot to pull from the big fuselage tank when pointed up or from those wing tanks when pointed down. Sideways was the “off” position.

When the Hogans sold their airport to Butler County in the late ’70s, Bill went to Hook Field in Middletown, Ohio, to work with his sons, Terry and Mike, in a bustling freight operation. He’d sold the P-51 but owned the Taperwing outright, and it came too. For years he flew and fixed everything, from the smallest Aeronca to the company’s Beech 18s and DC-3s, but, eventually, time had its way, and he could no longer hold a medical. So if he was going to fly the Taperwing, it would have to be with somebody on board as PIC. It wasn’t a particularly challenging airplane to fly by 1929 standards, but it could be a handful on concrete or in a crosswind; not only was it old technology, but there were also extensive modifications to that fuel system.

So on a summer afternoon, Bill climbed in the front cockpit to check out Terry in the driver’s seat — the rear of the two-holer. Confusion about the fuel system and the selector valve and a poor decision about the takeoff nearly resulted in disaster for both of them.

The runway at Middletown is 6,100 feet long, which, I confess, invites people like Bill and Terry (and me) to use an intersection rather than taxi all the way to the end. So they chose a midfield-intersecting taxiway for the departure. They got off quickly enough, but were still low passing the end of the runway, and that’s when the ol’ Wright suddenly got very quiet. Now, the Taperwing has the glide ratio of an airborne refrigerator, so the only option was to put it down straight ahead into a noxious pond of chartreuse chemical goo off the end of Runway 23. The airplane flipped upside down, but Bill and Terry miraculously got out and, as far as I know, suffered no lasting effects from the chemical bath. At least, nothing a shot of Irish whiskey and a beer couldn’t fix.

Terry had inadvertently selected the empty upper-wing tanks. But because of the header-tank mod there was enough fuel to start, taxi and take off — and no more. If they’d used all the runway, they’d probably have been able to put it back down.

Why the FSDO manager assigned me to “counsel” Terry will always be a mystery, but it was the right thing to do. When Terry came to the FSDO and into my office, we closed the door.

“God,” he said, “I almost killed my dad.”

“Hey, I know how much you love Bill and can only imagine how you feel. You made some mistakes, but we all screw up. So thank the Good Lord it wasn’t your time, remember the lessons you learned and put it behind you. Oh, and consider yourself ‘counseled.’”

The senior Hogans are gone now, and, sadly, Terry too. But Hogan Field lives on, though not without a fight (which, I’m proud to say, I help fight). Art’s sons — Tom, Cliff and Fred — run a shop and a flying school at 
Butler County Regional Airport (HAO) and are seen as a thorn in the side of the rather officious airport administrator and county board members.

Oh, yeah … and the Taperwing survived only to end up on its back again when a landing-gear fitting failed. But it will fly again.