Roanoke’s Original Fly Boy

Wes Hillman lives in the shadow of the Roanoke Regional Airport.  Or maybe it’s the other way around.  Maybe the airport lives in his shadow.  That’s because he was flying from cow pasture to cow pasture before the airport was a gleam in someone’s eye.  He was experiencing carburetor ice in the air before he had a working refrigerator at his home.

Hillman has been flying since 1933, long before  they were regulating such things, spending time soloing up in the air at an age when most kids were still tied to their Mama’s apron strings.  Some of the discipline he received came from the hands of the guys hanging out by the planes.  When other boys were sent to the woodshed, he was sent to a little shack with spare parts.

He can recount story upon story at the drop of a hat.  It’s easy for him to break out in his characteristic huge smile when he speaks with respect about the people he knew.  The ten-year-old boy that started hanging around airplanes is still there to see behind the crinkly brown eyes.  He’s right there inside the man who had enough courage to land nine airplanes whose engines failed.

Standing alongside him for sixty-three years is the woman that Hillman describes as “my right arm, believe you me.” Edith Hillman has had her challenges with the guy who bought a flying business without consulting her in 1951, a short four years into their marriage.  Their only daughter Melinda would play in the sandbox at the field while Edith learned to run the business alongside her husband.  Her steadfastness contributed to the history of aviation in Roanoke as surely as did Hillman, who will tell you that he has had one swallow of beer, two swallows of wine, and never tasted whiskey in his life.

Hillman has trained a lot of people to fly during the course of his career.  He’s been called “the meanest flight instructor,” because he was a stickler for detail.  No one that he trained has died in the cockpit because of pilot error.  If you flew under Wes Hillman, you learned how to fly right.  His recent past includes surgery at the hand of one of the pilots he trained.  Some of the people he has trained have gone on to serve the world in many ways that have made a difference.  That’s not bad for a guy who was training pilots just seven short years after his first flight.

He can tell you exactly how many times he’s “dropped a body” in ashes along these beautiful mountains at someone’s request.  There is still one person alive in Roanoke who remembers manning the tower and hearing that phrase over the radio.  Of course, Hillman was flying long before there was even a radio in the plane.  Hand signals and gosports were his main methods of communication back in the day.

In the early days of aviation in the valley, a lot went on that was never documented.  Many stories that go untold remain in the heart of Wes Hillman.  After all, if you’ve flown 30,000 hours and filled out 26 log books, you have a story to tell indeed.  If you spend any time in his presence, you’re bound to hear one . . . and probably more.