R.I.P. Highflyer

Tragic news this week. One of the first friends I met when I joined this group as a student pilot has died in the crash of his "second" plane.

Friends who knew John Johnson of southern Illinois will agree, because The Red Lady, his Stinson, was first in his heart...but she was nearly destroyed in a hangar fire a couple of years ago. An Apache he'd been restoring suffered less damage, and he was on the way to the Antique Airplane Association fly-in at Blakesburg, Iowa, when he and another man in the plane were killed in a crash in Missouri, near the Mississippi River.

The newspaper in Quincy, Illinois has the first story and as I write this, others are only running the same story they broke this morning.

I met my husband at a fly-in at Highflyer's hangar in Pinckneyville, and we camped at the annual event for three years running before he proposed to me under the stars at the end of the runway. Our host was thrilled at the news, though we were far from the only people who met good friends through his companionship.

And John's not the only person we've met there who has died in an airplane crash in recent years, but his loss pretty near breaks my heart.

-- Stella