Monday, August 24, 2020
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Mr. Marion D. "Barney" Ewell, was my Primary Flying Instructor (Doss), at Fort Rucker, instructing me how to fly the Hughes TH-55 "Osage", maybe August or September 1978, for Class 78-37 "Red Flight". Oddly, I cannot remember any other Instructor, but I will always remember Mr. Ewell. I would like to relate a funny story about Mr. Ewell, first. We were flying the TH-55 without the doors, one steamy Alabama day. I was sitting in the right seat. Mr. Ewell put the TH-55 into a right banking turn and to me the ground loomed large and I was unaware that I was leaning further and further to the left, until I was leaning on him. He shrugged his right shoulder and said, "Get off me, you're not going to fall out!" One of Mr. Ewell's favorite sayings or instructional points, when doing hovering autorotation practice was, "Think long, think wrong." And, another, I believe when we were flying past the water tower in Newton, when we were doing a navigation exercise, I had a folded map in my lap, when he asked me, "Where are we?" Studying the map, carefully, I was unsure. He said, "Look out to the right. What do you see?" After I replied, that I could see the water tower with the name Newton on the side, he said, "Reference Points, me boy, Reference Points." God bless, him. I carried what he taught me, in my very soul, for the next 36 years of my flying career. I passed on what he taught to my Student Pilots, just the way he said it. Twenty years after graduating Army Flight Training, I became a Captain flying Boeing 747-400 jumbo jets. I called him with the good news and to thank him. I surely miss him and have thought about Mr. Ewell, since we first met. He was a rare Flight Instructor.
