With His Head, Heart in the Clouds
By ELENA MARSH
Staff Writer
In life, passions and people stick around the longest. On his recent 76th birthday, Seven Lakes resident Marshall Howell got the best of both when he took off from the Moore County Airport with his wife, Missy, as a passenger for the first time in three years.
Marshall was a corporate pilot for 50 years, flying everywhere east of the Mississippi. He spent many of his 10,000 flight hours toting business professionals to meetings and luxury getaways, taking NASCAR teams to races and even flying in tourists for the 1999 U.S. Open.
His love of flying started when he was 5. His mother would take him and his brother to an old airport with a grass runway to watch little J-3 Cubs, a yellow plane, take off and land.
“And every weekend I’d say, ‘I want to see a pilot,’” said Marshall. “ One day she finally drove us around and I watched a guy get out of the airplane.
“I said, ‘Is that a pilot?’ Another guy gets out, I said, ‘Is that a pilot?’ She said, ‘Well, one of them is.’ And I looked at her, I thought to myself as a kid, ‘two legs, two arms, only one head. Hey, I’m going to do it. I’m going be a pilot one day.’”
At 19, Marshall was drafted in the first lottery for the Vietnam War. As luck would have it, he served in the U.S. Air Force and learned to fly in 1972, serving as a crew chief on a Lockheed C-141 Starlifter.
“It turned out to be a godsend,” he said. “That was what taught me to fly.”
Over the 50 years of his flying career, he “retired” four or five times.
“I kept going back to work,” he said. “I define retirement as working as much and as often as you want.”
Still, even with a workaholic’s heart, Marshall stopped officially flying in 2022 due to pilot age requirements and the cost of general aviation. But in the last three years, he never took his eye off the sky.
His wife contacted a local flight school, Sandhills Fliers, knowing her husband’s love for aviation, to see if the gift of flight was at all possible.
“He’s been talking around the house about how much he has missed flying,” said Missy, a retired U.S. Airways flight attendant.
With the help of pilot and flight instructor Richy Berry, Marshall took to the sky once again in the pilot’s seat on a clear, 80-degree day — perfect flying weather.
While Missy and Marshall will be celebrating 26 years of marriage this year, Marshall still remembers another love of his: a Beechcraft Baron, named “Dessie” after his mother.
“She (my mother) was a tough old bird,” he said. As for what he liked about it the most? The speed.
“That airplane traveled 200 miles an hour,” he said. “And it had a long range.”
Giving it up was another story. Marshall and his first wife flew a lot together in Dessie as a hobby. When she died of ovarian cancer, the frequent flights stopped, and he said goodbye to two of the loves of his life.
“She and I had a lot of memories in that plane,” he said. “I was closing a chapter, so to speak.”
Dessie’s farewell was not without fanfare. On the plane’s last day, Marshall spent the day in Concord and took friends and family up in the air.
While Marshall and Missy met one another on the ground, both bonded over their love of flying. Giving Marshall the ability to fly one last time this year was an important goal for Missy.
“From my perspective, it was fun, and Marshall was on a high afterward,” said Missy, reflecting on the plane ride a couple of days later.
For a man who believes that the most dangerous thing about flying is the drive to and from the airport, Marshall won’t be taking off behind the yoke again.
“It is bittersweet,” said Marshall. “It feels like the last hoorah. Richy was a good gentleman, and I enjoyed flying with him.”
As for what he will miss most: “Takeoff is the thing I always come back to. It is more work to do, of course. There is a thrill of leaving the Earth. You are no longer Earthbound, you are free.”
Contact Elena Marsh at (910) 693-2484 or elena@thepilot.com.
