Aero Club luncheon features three pilots

Clay Lacy learned to fly an airplane in west Wichita when he was 12.

Lee Lauderback was 15 when he started flying. Angela West was 17 when she took her first flight in a Cessna 140.

The three pilots were part of the Wichita Aero Club’s December luncheon Tuesday at the Doubletree by Hilton Wichita Airport.

West, director of operations for Florida-based Stallion 51, was a substitute for Patty Wagstaff, a world champion aerobatics pilot who was ill and unable to make the Tuesday event billed as the club’s “Great Pilots” panel.

The event was moderated by aviation photographer Paul Bowen.

Lacy, 83, is an accomplished pilot with more than 50,000 flight hours. He also runs Clay Lacy aviation, a successful southern California-based fixed-base operation and aircraft charter and sales business. He said that, as a child growing up in Wichita in the 1930s and 1940s, his first airplane ride was in a Beech Staggerwing.

He credits his pilot training to Orville Sanders, who he said ran West Meadows Airport near what is now Maple and Tyler. He described Sanders as a “loose” guy who let him get in the cockpit and at the controls of a number of the airport’s planes.

“He thought I could fly an airplane and let me fly them,” Lacy said.

Lacy’s piloting career included rising to the rank of senior captain with United Airlines, where he started as a DC-3 co-pilot when he was 19. Later in his career, Lacy moved from the airline’s propeller aircraft to jets, including the Boeing 727 and 747-400 jumbo jet.

During his airline career, he also was a fighter pilot in the California Air National Guard and a dealer demonstration pilot and salesman for Learjet.

Bowen noted during the discussion that in 2010, Lacy received the Federal Aviation Administration’s Wright Brothers Master Pilot Award, which the agency awards to pilots who have flown safely for 50 or more years.

“If you can fly 50 years without killing yourself, you should probably get some kind of award,” Lacy said.

Lauderback, chief pilot and owner of Stallion 51, grew up admiring Lacy. He said when he was a child, he had a model of a World War II-era P-51 Mustang that he painted purple – Lacy won the the Reno Air Race’s Unlimited Class in 1970 in a purple P-51.

Lauderback has 21,000 flight hours, including 9,000 hours in a P-51. His career included 17 years as co-pilot, and later chief pilot, for golfing legend Arnold Palmer.

He is an instructor and demonstration pilot for the P-51, a P-51 pilot for the Air Force Heritage Flight Foundation and an FAA pilot examiner. In 2013, he was inducted into the Experimental Aircraft Association’s Warbirds of America Hall of Fame.

He owns Stallion 51, which provides orientation flights in the P-51 Mustang and T-6 Texan and offers aircraft management, sales and FAA medical certifications.

Lauderback said one of his other passions in life is falconry.

“What I’ve figured out is we don’t really know aviation,” he said. “These guys (falcons) really know how to do it well.”

West, who is a pilot, focused largely on her work as operations director at Stallion 51 and before that as special events manager at Fantasy of Flight, a central Florida aviation venue that includes a private collection of vintage aircraft.

West said she was hooked on aviation following her first flight in a single-engine Cessna. She said that was her first brush with the industry, growing up in Tennessee in a family that had no connections to the business.

This story was originally published December 15, 2015 at 7:00 PM with the headline "Aero Club luncheon features three pilots."