the bennymay story: chapter 1

kid

Childhood: 1975 – 1991

My father, and his father, and his father all served in the military. My father started flying in the late 1940s, and served in Korea with the U.S. Army Air Corps. After he and his best friend, Bob, returned from Korea, they studied and flew in California. My dad flew over ten thousand hours and ‘Uncle Bob’ co-engineered rockets in JPL, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Houston, Texas, including Apollo’s Lunar Modules, the X-15, and the Space Shuttles. My very first memory is from Houston.

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Mum & Mustang (car), California, late 1960s [photo by Dad

Dad took me flying soon after I was born, and regularly since then. At age three I declared my future career ambitions to my family: I wanted to fly jets and rockets.

Dad loved flying. He loved working as a pilot. Dad was licensed as both a pilot and mechanical engineer for both fixed-wing and rotary-wing aircraft. NASA approached him many times to work for them. When Dad and I were driving down the Californian coast, where he and Bob used to live and study, I asked him why he never accepted NASA’s job offers. Dad just said, ‘They kept asking if they could take Bob and me out to a nice dinner, and at the end of the meal they would ask me if I had changed my mind. I kept telling them, ‘No, thank you. Like I told you last time, ‘I don’t want to work with you. If you keep offering to buy me nice meals, I’ll keep saying ‘Yes’ to the meal, but I’m not going to change my mind about working for you.’ (Now you all know who to blame, when you’re wondering why I don’t always care to heed inquistors’ demands for straight answers.)

Vari Eze (photographed by my dad, in preparation for building his own)

When I was about 3 years old I began helping Dad build a Rutan-designed aircraft, which we later flew. It was not as fast as the P-51 Mustang he used to fly out of California, but it kept my heart in aviation through my childhood. I explored, rode skateboards and motorbikes, waterskiied, steered (since age 2) and drove cars (alone since age 5), and trucks and tractors, and did countless other activities, but taking the stick and flying was always my favourite childhood past-time.

I had a lot of fun, but I was never merely a thrill-seeking adrenaline junkie, with delusions of invulnerability, or a penchant for unmitigated risk. Years before aviation psychologists had ever taught me about the six hazardous attributes to aviation (including invulnerability), I learned about aviation risks both the easy way—dad telling me—and the hard way—which began a few weeks before my seventeenth birthday, and would leave me in extreme pain for much of the next two years.

Sometimes aviation bites.

[In memory of Greg van der Quaak, friend in high school, Specialist Platoon, church, Senior High, and Ken Moser’s Bible study group.]

© Benjamin May 2009

Go to chapter 2.