Ron is exactly right on how we did it. Can you imagine a bunch of students, before credit cards were really around, getting financing from a bank? No way!
So we went to a little sod field a few miles from Ann Arbor. I forget the name, but it had a hump in the runway about 600 feet from the threshold. So in our Cessna 150 with two aboard and no wind, we were treated to two takeoffs for each takeoff. Beat that!
I forget the exact numbers, but we charged $8 an hour wet and paid the little FBO/mechanic less than that. We loved that airport because we got home field advantage. When we challenged our mentally unstable rival Michigan State University to a National Intercollegiate Flying Competition at our home field...their team flew down from East Lansing. Since there planes were based at an airport whose concrete runways were wider than the length of our runway, they were so scared to land. They all missed our entire airport on their first landings. And they didn't do any better on their power -on and power-off landings either. We swept the competition!
Gordon Aviation at the Ann Arbor airport heard about us. Maybe because the Ann Arbor News ran a story about trouncing Michigan State and gave me a call. He wanted our business and financed a lease back for several 150s and that Cherokee 180 Ron mentioned.
I recall one Christmas break taking that 180 with English Bendix (designers of the Apollo moon landing experiments) engineer Gil Alexander and his British friends to Grand Bahama Island. The car rental place refused to rent us a car since we were all under 25. I said...look that plane we flew down here is worth $25,000 and Gordon Aviation financed it. To no avail, they refused to rent us a $5,000 car. We were only able to rent two Honda 50 (50 CC) motorbikes. So one person drove and the other sat on the back and held a bag in each arm. We went back and forth from the airport 4 or five times to move our luggage. The reward was, since it was a British Colony or something or other, if you could get your nickel up on the bar, you get a beer! Since I was under 21, that was a nice reward.
I couldn't cut a good deal with Gordon for the next year, so we moved the club to Willow Run Airport where Ford use to make bombers during World War II. The runways there were about 75 miles long so there went our spot landing skills.
To practice, we went down to Tecumseh Airport about 40 miles south of Ann Arbor. It was a private airport owned by Tecumseh products that made compressors and other stuff. We practiced and practiced and practiced power-on and off spot landings and bomb drops. Things like, what you are NOT suppose to do, if your a bit high...pushing forward to loose altitude and just barely touching as flat as possible at the target line. Dick Hoesli was the pro at that! And I have since learned he became the chief pilot at Kraft Foods. That explains Velveeta? Too much push forward and one enjoyed a nice BOUNCE, but heck this was college competition!
My favorite was the bomb drop. Two barrels were lined up off the side of the runway and we tried to drop two pound sacks of lime and sand into the barrels. Because the Tecumseh people won't appreciate us drawing caulk lines all over the airport, we use team member's cars as markers. And Ron Levy's Triumph was one of them. Either Dick Hoesli was flying and I was the bombardier or the other way around...nevertheless we lined up for the bomb run like we were going to drop the sack right into Ron's car. I can still see Ron running like hell towards his car to move it out of harms way, when we released the bomb and it hit the middle of the runway and exploded in a swath of powder just missing Ron's beloved car and Ron himself. I swear Ron nearly had a heart attack! At least he looked like a scarecrow!
After moving to Willow Run and being reminded of the fun we had on Honda 50's, I bought a Honda 90 (twice the power) to commute to the airport from Ann Arbor to teach my students. One dusk, while returning home at about 26 mph and near the centerline of the road, since the edge was undergoing reconstruction, I arose over a hill and a sawhorse was in the middle of the street. Being the incompetent motorcycle rider that I was, I swerved and caught the sawhorse on the middle finger of my right hand, laid the bike down on its side (like I could control anything at that point) and slid on the concrete for about 33.3 feet. The bubble on my face guard burst as my head came to rest 6 inches from the curb.
Turns out I picked (like I could pick anything) the perfect place to crash. I lay in front of the Dean of Nurses of the University of Michigan Hospitals. She came out to tend to me and transported me to the emergency room. Two doors down was a guy that fixes motorcycles. He dragged my studly 90 CC BIKE to his place and fixed the front wheel that was impersonating a pretzel. And, the best of all, was across the street a personal injury lawyer. He sued the city for putting the sawhorse in the middle of the street! Where even me, with the superb reflexes to even teach Ron Levy how to fly, couldn't miss it at a speed my Honda 90 couldn't reach down hill with a Hurricane behind it! A few years later the city settled and I got enough money ($4,000) to buy my first house financed solely on the middle finger of my right hand! It was fun putting that down on the loan application to answer the question: Where did you get the money for the down payment? Answer: Middle finger of...
Since the trip to Willow Run was so dangerous, I talked to Gordon again and we cut a better deal and took the club back to where it belonged: Ann Arbor Airport. We added a few more planes, I stepped down as president and was on the Board and Ron and others took over, but was involved in supporting the building of an American Supersonic Transport with a group that my aerospace professor and author on propellers Wilbur Nelson asked me to form: a student group called FASST. It stood for "Fly America's SST". See the Time Magazine article at:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,904898-1,00.html
I figured the club was growing so fast we needed America to build an SST so we could buy one. And this was the first time in history that a major aviation advance would be funded outside the Department of Defense.
After the SST was shot down by anti-technology forces, I was encouraged by former SST director Bill Magruder (Chief test pilot on 144 aircraft and "father of the astronauts" and Special Consultant to the President on Science and Technology) to move the group to support science and technology)
So it became Friends of Aerospace Supporting Science and Technology and then Federation of American's Supporting Science and Technology. Versatile acronym it was. One of its purposes was to influence Congress to support alternative energy policies so the nation wasn't as dependent on middle east oil. Lot of good that did! But we did help get Congress to fund the Space Shuttle. Lot of good that did!
The University of Michigan Flyers continued to grow and when I left the Board to focus on FASST, and try to graduate, we had about 25 planes and $5 M in revenues. We did it all with lease-backs and profits while destroying the concept that says: "There is a lot of money in aviation. I know I put it there".
I don't think Ron and I ever flew together....
