Vintage Flyer: Karl Erickson

It was one of the more modern aircraft he’s flown. “I was in a 172 once,” he said. “Then I got right back out of it.” He admits to maybe—maybe—100 hours in conventional “modern” airplanes. The rest of his time, nearly 2,000 hours, he’s logged in prewar aircraft—that war being World War I.

Erickson is among a handful of pilots who can fly pioneer aircraft such as the old Curtiss pushers. A Curtiss pusher has a stick that controls the elevator, but the pilot grips a steering wheel mounted on top of the stick, and turns the wheel to control the rudder. He wears a wooden shoulder yoke and leans to control the ailerons. And there’s an accelerator beneath the pilot’s right foot. “It’s a piece of cake, unless you have 25,000 hours,” Erickson said. “If you’ve got a car or a motorcycle. If you don’t think ‘aircraft.’”

Erikson grew up not too far north of Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome, then owned and operated by Cole Palen, who died in 1993. “When I was a kid I spent all my spare time there,” he said. “I’d sleep in the hangars, dirt-floor hangars, with no food, no heat. I wouldn’t trade it for a million bucks.” One day, when Erikson was 22, Palen told him to take up the 1909 Blériot XI. “I sat in the airplane and thought ‘take little hops,’” he said. Eventually he flew weekend shows in the Blériot, then the Curtiss Model D pusher, and the Hanriot, each with a unique control system.

In 2001, he moved to Maine and became aircraft conservator at the Owls Head Transportation Museum. Recently, though, when flying airshows every weekend for 28 years started taking its toll, he began Erickson Flying Service (www.ericksonflying.com), instructing in Light Sport aircraft and inspecting, maintaining, and restoring antique aircraft.

“I just love that era, the prewar era, when the world was still innocent,” he says. “You’re going 25 miles an hour. Who cares if the engine blows up? Just to get off the ground was a good thing.”