‘Where Aircraft Live’
Rowles begins, “I was born and raised in West Palm Beach, Florida. I’m not from an aviation family, but I was the quintessential airport kid. My father (a mechanic for a golf course) for my 14th birthday bought me a lesson in a little Cessna 152 to see if I liked flying. I came out of that lesson really knowing that I wanted to fly. My father told me, ‘I’m glad you liked that. I paid for the first lesson, you got to figure out how to pay for the rest of them.’”
His father then wisely suggested that his aviation-oriented son spend his spare time “where aircraft live.” Rowles followed that advice and it contributed to his basic flight training. “I spent all my spare time at the airport, beginning with middle school and through the years developing relationships that allowed me to barter my personal time for flight time,” he says.
Love & Struggle
The young teen also naturally got interested in subjects other than flight. In seventh grade he met a girl named Samantha. She became his wife and the couple became parents at the tender age of 18. “We’ve been together since, and she’s been with me from the first hour of my aviation life, both as a couple and also as a business partner in our aviation businesses,” Rowles says. Understandably, the young parents were under adult-grade stress as they began and quit high school. “I quit high school for financial reasons,” says Rowles. “The reason I had success despite quitting school and having made a lot of bad decisions is because of key people who mentored me.”
Mentoring
One of those key people was a flying angel named Peggy Lang; she was a pilot for a local car dealership. Lang was also the aviation director for the local community college, and she took an interest in Rowles’ future. She convinced the youngster to go back to school. Rowles says, “That lasted two days until I realized I still hated school and dropped out again and resumed working for my dad at the golf course.”
Rowles was in the depths of hardship with no real foreseeable future. “Then,” he says, “Peggy made the phone call in 1987 that changed my life.”
She phoned Rowles and asked him to come to her college office the next morning. Upon arriving, Rowles learned that Lang had been working on his behalf. “She told me to report to Boca Raton High School later that week, where she had arranged for me to take the GED (high school graduate equivalency degree) exam,” says Rowles. “I passed and she immediately invited me to take aviation classes at her college. From that, doors started opening up for me as I met local aviation business owners (Johnny Stinson and Danny Crowe) who gave me employment and experience.”
One of those first jobs was fueling Delta jet airliners, and even the Concorde, at the underage of 17. “I lied about my age to get the job because I was broke,” Rowles admits. The fueler later “graduated” to sweeping floors and cleaning toilets in the West Palm Beach airport’s airplane shop. There was a similar fellow in the helicopter hangar who preferred airplanes, while Rowles was curious about helicopters. “We reported to work one day and learned that our respective employers had swapped us, so I was traded like a ball player to Air Coastal Helicopters where I began to sweep and clean toilets around helicopters.”
Then a shop mechanic named Ron invited the teen to tag along on a helicopter delivery flight. “It was that day that I realized that helicopter aviation was the most amazing career that one could have,” Rowles remembers. “It was almost indescribable because it wasn’t one singular thing that convinced me, but just the whole experience of flying with professionals and feeling that I was a part of their industry.”
Rowles got his commercial helicopter license on his 18th birthday because the owner of Palm Beach Helicopters, Brian Parker, agreed to invest in Rowles’s aviation education. He paid for the hangar rat’s flight training, and the newly licensed Rowles agreed to fly for Parker’s crop-dusting start-up in Georgia. That challenging piloting allowed Rowles to live out his earliest aviation interest. “I had first been excited by airplane aerobatic flying, but it would never have worked out financially. But then, when I did that helicopter agricultural flying, it was the closest thing to aerobatic flying. It tied into my earliest desire to do energy-based flying, but it was in a helicopter. That’s when helicopters hooked me hard.”
After fulfilling his Georgia agricultural flying duty, Rowles returned home to West Palm Beach and Aircoastal Helicopters, where he was given the opportunity to be a Part 135 line pilot. Within a couple years he became chief pilot of the operation.
Rowles (far right) with Era Group at a N.Y. Stock Exchange closing bell ceremony.
rotorcraftpro.com
15
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82
