Pilot relives golden age of aviation 97-year-old addresses captive Owls Head crowd

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OWLS HEAD – The expression “flying by the seat of your pants” just may have been coined with Johnny Miller in mind.

Miller’s first solo flight also was his first flight in an airplane, he told a rapt group of about 100 people on Saturday at the Owls Head Transportation Museum.

Now 97, Miller’s career as a pilot coincided with the golden age of flight. He continues to fly, arriving at the speaking engagement in his small plane, assisted by a co-pilot, a concession he made to age just this year.

When he spoke at the museum last year, he flew in alone from his home in the Poughkeepsie, N.Y., area.

Miller’s love of flight began in the 1920s when he was a teen. He read and reread every book on aviation he could get his hands on, and then, in 1923, he was given an airplane by an early barnstorming pilot.

He practiced taxiing the plane on a farmer’s field and gained the sense of how to make it rise off the ground slightly. Then, with no one else onboard, Miller, at age 18, decided to take off.

Once airborne, he realized he didn’t know how to turn the aircraft, but, by experimenting, he learned how to bank and change direction. The next challenge came when he realized he did not know where he was, and the fuel gauge was approaching empty.

Using the sun for direction, he headed east until he was able to identify the Hudson River, and he followed it home. After setting down in a field, he was greeted by the farmer, who asked for a ride. Without even turning the engine off, Miller accepted some money from the man and took off again.

Capitalizing on the public’s keen interest in flight, Miller began regularly taking people up in his plane for $5 a trip.

“Five dollars was a lot of money in 1923,” he said.

There were no regulations governing flight in those days, Miller said.

“If you flew, you were an aviator,” he said. “I was perfectly legal, if not sensible.”

Miller then enrolled at Pratt Institute of Technology in New York and studied mechanical engineering, graduating in 1927. He remembers when Charles Lindbergh flew across the continent, arriving in New York to prepare for his record-setting flight across the Atlantic.

“I cut classes to go out and see his airplane,” he recalled.

A few days later, he watched Lindbergh depart from Roosevelt Field on Long Island.

“I stood behind,” Miller said, “to see which telephone pole he was going to hit.”

The airplane just cleared the wires between two poles, Miller remembered.

“He disappeared in the murk, and I thought, ‘We’ll never see the poor fellow again,'” he said.

After graduating from Pratt, Miller planned to “barnstorm,” or fly around the country giving rides for money. His classmates tried to dissuade him, showing him newspaper clippings of deadly plane crashes.

“Don’t worry,” he told them. “I’m going to go flying.”

But since he didn’t own a plane then, he got work as an airplane mechanic. When a “flying circus” came to town, Miller was engaged to replace two pistons on an engine.

After the repairs, he followed the flying circus to Massachusetts, and watched as the plane on which he had worked stalled in midair, while pieces of the engine fell out. After it safely crash-landed, Miller learned that the problem was not related to his repairs.

Soon, he purchased a plane and set off to barnstorm.

After a slow start, Miller hit upon a strategy that worked. Staying only in rural areas where people had not seen many planes, he would send out penny postal cards to everyone in town, timing them to arrive in boxes on Thursday and Friday mornings, announcing $1 plane rides.

“I would send out thousands of them,” he said.

Then he would cover telephone poles with posters, directing residents to the $1 flights.

“You talk about a crowd – boy!” Miller recalled. “Thousands of people, and I had only one airplane.”

Farmers would milk their cows early and arrive at the field where Miller had set up, and flights would continue all day, lasting no more than a minute each.

“I would never stop the engine all day,” he said. “I would never get out of the cockpit all day.” Refueling was done with 5-gallon buckets, while the plane continued to run.

Even though the flights were brief, he said, people wanted to be able to brag about having flown.

By 1930, barnstorming had ended, and Miller began working as a mechanic at a Poughkeepsie airport. With Prohibition in effect, pilots were finding lucrative work in smuggling whiskey from Canada, carrying two or three loads a day, Miller said.

“I was not in the bootlegging business,” he said. “Not directly.”

Miller was kept busy repairing landing gears that broke when planes were overloaded with whiskey. Bootleggers, carrying at least two handguns each, would stand around his hangar, impatiently waiting for the repairs to be completed.

Later, Miller became the first person to fly across the continent in an Autogiro, the precursor of the helicopter, taking that honor away from Amelia Earhart, whom the manufacturer wanted to be the first.

Miller once safely crash-landed an Autogiro while towing a banner around Manhattan, he said.

After marrying and starting a family, Miller chose a safer career, flying for United Airlines, and later, working as a test pilot for Eastern Airlines.

A few years ago, Miller appeared on a television program in New York, he said, “because I was the only person they could find who had seen Lindbergh take off who was still alive.”

When the centennial of the Wright brothers’ flight is marked in Kitty Hawk, N.C., next year, Miller hopes to be there.

“I’ll only be 98,” he said, jokingly.