Each week, the Shreveport-Bossier Journal’s Tony Taglavore takes to lunch a local person – someone who is well-known, successful, and/or influential, and asks, “What’s Your Story?”
By TONY TAGLAVORE, Journal Services
High Flight
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter—silvered wings.
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of wheeled and soared and swung.
High in the sunlit silence, hov’ring there
I’ve chased the shouting winds along and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long delirious burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark nor ever eagle flew
And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.
-John Gillespie Magee, Jr.
Air Force fighter pilot and war poet
All these years later, he still remembers the date.
December 13, 1981.
His pilot’s license was fresh off the printing press. In his first job as a corporate pilot, he was flying for a well-known family. One of his first assignments? Go from Beaumont to Houston and pick up a member of that family.
“The weather had low ceilings. No thunderstorms, just low ceilings. Low visibility. Coming over the bay at Houston, I started noticing specks on the windshield. I thought, ‘What the heck is that? It’s not raining.’ I looked at the cylinder head temperature. The oil pressure was real low and the cylinder head temperature was real high, which meant the engine was fixing to quit. It started sputtering.”
This is probably a good time to tell you the plane he was flying, a Cessna P210, was a single-engine aircraft.
“I told Houston approach control, ‘I’ve lost an engine.’ (The air traffic controller) said, ‘Hobby (airport) is reporting 300 overcast (which is low), and two miles visibility.’ Well, I wasn’t going to make Hobby. I didn’t have an engine.”
You know how you’re not supposed to eavesdrop on other people’s conversations? In this case, the 26-year-old was glad someone did.
“There was a guy coming out of LaPorte, Texas, who heard what was going on. He said, ‘I just took off from LaPorte, and they’re 900 feet overcast with good visibility.’ I said, ‘That’s where I want to go.’ They vectored me in and I landed with no engine power—a single engine airplane.”
Man, he must have been scared to death.
“I never was scared or frightened, but when I got on the ground my knees started knocking. When it was all over, it hit me.”
Benton’s Keith David, a corporate pilot with close to 50 years and 18,000 hours of experience, told me that story – and his story – over lunch at a place Keith chose, Strawn’s Eat Shop Also. Keith had a hamburger, fries, and unsweet tea. I enjoyed the lunch special of fried catfish. We both topped off our meal with slices of Strawn’s famous pie (Keith had coconut, I had strawberry).
“It’s against the law if you don’t get pie here.”
Keith and I met on rare day when he wasn’t flying. Keith spends a lot of time amongst the clouds, but not as much as he used to.
“In 2000, I was gone 321 nights.”
Just a reminder, there are 365 days in a year.
In the weeks after our lunch, Keith would fly to Destin, Florida, Camden, Tennessee, the Napa Valley, and Crested Butte, Colorado. In his 40-plus year career, Keith has been to all 50 states, and places like Costa Rica, Panama, and the Turks and Caicos. He’s attended major sporting events, including the Kentucky Derby, Daytona 500, and several Super Bowls. You may have heard of some of his passengers – Terry Bradshaw, Donald Trump, Jr., and the late, outspoken, former Texas Governor Ann Richards. (“She was a wild card.”).
“I’m always in awe of God’s beauty. I’ve never discounted the things I’ve seen. I’ve had a front row seat to the world. I really have. I’m very fortunate to have seen all those things and do what I’ve done. I’ve never taken it for granted. I’ve been blessed. I’ve been paid well. I’ve done what I wanted do my whole life.”
Well, not his whole life.
Keith, his brother, and two sisters, were raised by their mother. Oh, their father was present, but in body only.
“He was driving from Minden to Shreveport and a drunk driver hit him. It was a bad deal.”
That happened two months before Keith was born. His father suffered brain damage and left mentally disabled. The accident left Keith to grow up without a father figure.
“I never knew any different until I got older and saw friends asking their dads for advice. When I think about that, it works on me a little bit, but I’ve learned to park it somewhere in my brain where I don’t let it bother me.”
With only one parent providing for the family, times were tough.
“I noticed we moved a lot. I didn’t figure out until years later the reason was because the rent was due. We couldn’t pay it, so we moved.”
Like many kids, Keith grew up wanting to be a fireman. “Still, I wish sometimes I would have been. I thought that was the coolest job.” But Keith knew it was best for him to follow in his father’s footsteps and join the United States Marine Corps, where he went straight from Woodlawn High School.
“It was something I needed for stability and direction. That was one of the best things I’ve ever done. It was a smart move, and it’s paid big dividends ever since.”
During Keith’s two years as a Marine, he got the urge to learn to fly.
“We were doing a night jump into Lake O‘Neill at Camp Pendleton. I was the last guy. I stood up between the two pilots, and they said, ‘Man, you guys are stupid, jumping out of an airplane into a lake at night.’ When I jumped out, I saw the airplane going away, and I thought, ‘You know, those guys are probably on to something.’ That’s what planted a seed.”
Back home, Keith grew that seed – quickly. Instead of going into a college’s four-year aviation program, Keith took flying lessons on his own out of Shreveport’s Downtown Airport. In a year’s time, he had his pilot’s license. But Keith’s eye was on a being a corporate – not a commercial – pilot.
“The airlines certainly had their advantages. You had a safety net to some degree . . . . If something were to happen to (a family’s) principle, the airplane goes away. That’s the first thing to go. It costs a tremendous amount of money to operate (a plane). I think our airplane (a Citation 560 jet) costs like $7,000 an hour just to crank it up and go somewhere. Fuel is expensive. Maintenance (is expensive).”
But the corporate world had its advantages also, which appealed to Keith more than that safety net.
“If I go to New York on a trip, I stay wherever I want, eat whatever I want. The airlines give you a per diem, and you’re restricted on what you can buy and where you can stay.”
But there was a price to pay for those perks. Every time it’s wheels up, Keith is responsible for the lives of others.
“People always say, ‘That’s my grandson on there. You make sure you get him back.’ I say, ‘If I’m going to make it, he’s going to make it. And I’m going to make it.’”
And then there was the personal price Keith paid – flying all over the world with three children at home.
“I’ve missed kids’ plays. Kids’ birthdays. But that’s part of the business . . . . That was hard on me and them, and particularly their mother. That’s a full-time job, (raising) kids that young. You’re not there to step in and take up some slack. When I was home, I would have been gone a week, and you have to decompress when you get home. You have to somehow in that period of time shift gears to being a daddy instead of a pilot. That was always kind of an odd transition.”
Keith and his current wife, Debbie, have seven children between them.
Surprisingly, the story Keith told me about losing an engine outside of Houston was, he said, the closest call he’s had in all his years flying. But while at times Keith’s plane may be on auto pilot, his mind never rests.
“You’re always doing mental gymnastics. You’re sitting up in the cockpit at 39,000 feet doing absolutely nothing. You’re managing the flight deck. You’re listening for changes in the engines. But you’re always cocked and ready. You may be just visiting with your co-pilot, but in the back of your mind, you’re listening to everything. If a gauge moves a millimeter, I will see it. Your mind is always set and ready to react to any emergency, and emergencies never come at the time you want them to come. It’s always unexpected.”
At age 70, Keith is still sharp, and goes to school each year for refresher courses. But he knows he only has two or three more years – at best – in the first seat.
“I can fly if I’m 150 years old. The problem is will somebody still insure you, and can you pass the (pilot’s) test.”
Resisting the urge to tell Keith I once flew in a small plane where the seats faced each other, and everyone got sick, I asked my final question. As always, what is it about his life that you might apply to your life.
“Set your goals. Be goal oriented. Find something you want to do that makes you happy and just go for it. That’s what I’ve done, and I’ve had a good life . . . . Have a good career. That’s what I’ve done. I’m thankful. I don’t take it for granted.”
At 39,000 feet, Keith has had the best seat in the house.
Do you know someone with a story? Email SBJTonyT@gmail.com.
The Journal’s weekly “What’s Your Story?” series is sponsored by Morris & Dewett Injury Lawyers.