Seeing Clearly with TR Carr · A Five-Part Story
The Charles
Cone Story
A Century of Flight, Faith & Persistence
Colonel, United States Air Force · 1926 – Present
A Burning Desire
to Fly
He was born into a world without electricity, without telephone, without running water — on an isolated farm thirty-five miles from Niagara Falls, in upstate New York. His mother died three weeks after he came into the world. He was raised, for his first years, by his grandparents. The Great Depression arrived at nearly the same time his father remarried, and together they worked a farm on shares — fifty-fifty with a generous landowner — trying to build something from almost nothing.
Charles Cone grew up the eldest of nine surviving children. He knew hard work before he knew comfort. He knew loss before he knew much else. And yet, somewhere around his eleventh or twelfth year, a thought arrived fully-formed and refused to leave: he was going to be a Navy pilot.
Five miles from the Cone farm, a civilian pilot training program had set up at a small airfield. On Sunday afternoons, Charlie would watch the biplanes overhead — loops, rolls, emergency landings in the fields — and something inside him was decided. He bored everyone around him talking about it. He didn't care.
To fund his first flying lessons, he rented fifteen acres from neighboring spinsters and raised pea beans — a Depression-era crop in high demand. He hitchhiked to Stefan Field, climbed into a Piper J-3 Cub that barely pushed 70 knots, and it was the most alive he had ever felt.
There was one problem: crippling hay fever and sinus conditions that would disqualify almost anyone from military aviation. Charlie's response was to simply not accept that. In 1944, still in his final months of high school, he enlisted in the United States Navy. He wanted the Corsair. He got the PBM Mariner — a lumbering patrol flying boat with a crew of eleven. He nearly handed his wings back in protest. He didn't.
Charles Cone — a young man with his eyes on the sky
The Stearman biplane — the kind of aircraft that started it all
Wings Over
the Pacific
The Martin PBM Mariner — the flying boat Charlie came to love
Colonel Cone — the pilot who always found a way to keep flying
The Pacific tested him in ways no training could have prepared him for. Engine failures over shark-infested water. A fuselage that filled with aviation fuel while Charlie and his crew flew barefoot, silent, not daring to key a single radio transmission — one stray spark from becoming a fireball. They later connected a similar incident to a PBM that vanished in the Bermuda Triangle. Charlie's crew made it back to Jacksonville. They landed. He doesn't dwell on it much.
He became one of the youngest patrol plane commanders in the Pacific — promoted early because he was too sharp not to be. Over China, he flew unarmed reconnaissance missions at low altitude over territory already falling to Communist forces. When Chinese gunners warned him — in decent English — that they would shoot him down if he came around again, Charlie came around again. Eight anti-aircraft shells burst alongside the plane. The altitude was perfect. The aim was not. He noted the Great Wall below and flew on.
On Easter Sunday, 1949, Charlie's crew flew the last Americans out of China as Mao's forces closed in. He had watched history happen from the cockpit of a slow flying boat, and he was not yet twenty-five years old.
The day he was supposed to be discharged from the Navy, his roommate's PBM went down — one flap came up, the other didn't — ten miles offshore. Charlie was called back because he was the only one who knew every man on board. He identified the bodies. Then he drove his roommate's remains home to Milwaukee.
At the funeral, standing at the casket, Charlie Cone looked up. A young woman looked back. Her name was Jo. They locked eyes, and as Charlie would say nearly seventy years later: they never unlocked. They were married that year. They stayed married for sixty-nine years.
Cold War
Cockpit
The B-47 Stratojet — nuclear bomber, wings held on by four bolts per side
"We looked at each other. We locked eyes. And we never unlocked."
— Charlie Cone, on meeting JoMarried that year. Together sixty-nine years.
He switched to the Air Force and flew F-51s for a year in the Wisconsin Air Guard — unpaid and happy. When Korea began, he flew B-26 night interdiction missions at two hundred feet above the peninsula, dropping napalm as a pathfinder to mark targets for the bomber stream. He came home with engine fires and wheels that wouldn't come down. He came home.
Then came the B-47 Stratojet — six jet engines, nuclear payload, wings so thin and precise that they were slowly killing the men who flew them. Metal fatigue in the wing bolts — four on each side — caused by the constant G-stress of nuclear toss-bombing maneuvers was cracking the spars. Aircraft were exploding at nearly one a week. Nobody survived. Nobody knew why — until two men survived over Tulsa in 1959.
Charlie volunteered for embassy duty in Greece — without telling Jo. The assignment arrived via letter on a Saturday morning. The explosion, Charlie admitted, was roughly atomic in scale. He never learned.
He bought a house without telling her. He showed it to her on Halloween of 1973. She liked it. She always did, somehow, come around. That was Jo.
The
Crossroads
He earned a bachelor's degree in industrial engineering from Ohio State while on active duty. Then, when the B-47s were phased out and cold northern postings loomed, he ran across the street to the education office. Six master's programs were available. One — ADP, automatic data processing — nobody had heard of. A civilian friend told him: by all means, take that one.
Charlie enrolled at Texas A&M. He earned the first computer science degree the university ever awarded — in 1964, before personal computers were imagined, with professors writing the textbooks as they taught them. He flew a Convair 240 on the weekends. He was the only student who got checked out in it. Some things didn't change.
Hobart College, 1940s — the world Charlie came from
The B-66 Destroyer — Vietnam era, still flying
"He is throwing away his career."
— Senior General, USAF, at Charlie's retirementCharlie had already made up his mind.
Vietnam came. He went. He flew. He came back. A general called him on a Sunday morning and said he'd done one hell of a job and asked what assignment he wanted. Charlie asked to command the Air Force Data Systems Design Center. The general said okay. It was an unheard-of thing.
Colonel Charles Cone was on the generals list. Two stars were nearly certain. He could see the path: Pentagon, prestige, a place in history.
He retired.
The senior general in the Air Force retired him personally, with Jo and his daughter present. He looked at them and said: "He is throwing away his career." Charlie had already made up his mind.
He was a pilot. If he wasn't flying, he wasn't staying. It was always that simple. From the day he was twelve years old on a farm in upstate New York, watching biplanes loop overhead — it was always that simple.
Still
Flying
At ninety-six years old, Charlie Cone flew a Piper Cub down in Texas — the seventy-eighth anniversary of his very first Cub flight as a teenager. On the drive back home, he told the man driving him: I think I'll learn to fly a helicopter.
He called a helicopter company. He asked if they would train a ninety-six-year-old. They asked if he had money. They took him on. He trained in the Robinson R-22 and eventually flew the R-44 — delivering a passenger from Pontiac to Harrison Island, landing in the man's front yard. That, Charlie noted, is what helicopters are for.
By the time TR Carr sat down with Charlie for this series, he was one hundred years old. He had survived engine explosions on takeoff that thirty-one veteran instructors, tested on the same scenario, could not control. He had survived a fuselage full of fuel, multiple ditchings, cracked wing spars, unarmed flights over hostile territory, three wars, and sixty-nine years of marriage. He had written a book about it — ...A Burning Desire to Fly — because someone had to.
At the close of the interview, TR Carr asked if Charlie had any final thoughts for anyone watching. He didn't hesitate. He'd been living the answer for a century.
The Robinson R-22 — Charlie's helicopter. Age 96. Still flying.
...A Burning Desire to Fly — available now on Amazon