Fifty years of safe flying is Valley Center woman’s ‘thing’ (+VIDEO)

Learning to fly was not Marilyn George’s goal.

George said she decided to try to flight training only after she made an agreement with her first husband: She’d go to ground school with him if he attended an adult education class with her. She wanted to brush up on her Spanish.

“He didn’t go to an adult education class with me, and I got hooked,” she said, laughing.

On Sunday, George will be recognized for more than 50 years of safe flying when local Federal Aviation Administration officials present her with the Wright Brothers Master Pilot award. The presentation will come during a private ceremony at Benton Airport.

George, 88, is the second Kansas woman to receive the award. She’s the 76th Kansas pilot — out of 8,847 FAA licensed pilots in the state — to receive it.

“We consider it to be a very prestigious award,” said James Lamb of the FAA’s Wichita Flight Standards District Office. “Very few people out of the total aviation pilots in the nation have received it.”

Lamb, the FAA Safety Team program manager in Wichita, said of the 669,718 licensed pilots in the U.S., only 3,123 — or half a percent — have received the award.

George has done most of her flying in two airplanes. The first was a 1946 Cessna 140 taildragger, which she used to earn her private pilot’s license when she was in her 30s and living in Emporia. The second is a 1959 Cessna 172, which she still owns and parks in a hangar behind her Valley Center home at High Point Air Park.

“It’s always brought me home,” George said, looking at the brown-and-gold colored 172 on Friday.

George, a retired comptroller for a feed manufacturer in Emporia, said her flying hours accelerated after she married her second husband, Tommy George, and moved to Valley Center in 1983.

“It’s been phenomenal,” she said of her years of flying. “I have been to places I never would have dreamed of in this lifetime.”

She said she and Tommy George, who was awarded the Master Pilot designation by the FAA in 2010, had flown to every state in the U.S. in their 172, as well as to Canada, Mexico, parts of Central America and the Bahamas. Tommy George died in 2012.

Trish Minard, chief executive of Southwest National Bank and a pilot since 2003, considers Marilyn George her mentor.

She met George the year Minard became a pilot, at a meeting of the Kansas Ninety-Nines, a chapter of the International Organization of Women Pilots.

Since then the two have become friends — and pilot competitors.

Minard said she has competed against George in several air rallies, and George is a “vicious competitor.”

“She was deadly accurate in that old 172,” Minard said. “She always beat me.”

For George, the love of flying is partly “ego” as well as having the ability to get in an airplane and go somewhere she hasn’t been before.

“It’s your thing,” she said. “A lot of people are good seamstresses or good cooks and take pride in that. But I fly.”

This story was originally published July 11, 2015 at 12:30 PM with the headline "Fifty years of safe flying is Valley Center woman’s ‘thing’ (+VIDEO)."