During his career as a corporate pilot, John Schussler saw up-close the value of general aviation—business-wise and in lives saved.

At the start of his career in the early 1970s, Schussler worked for a Texas restaurant chain, Chelsea Street Pubs. He flew company executives to visit branches throughout Texas and in Baton Rouge, La., Albuquerque, N.M., and Gainesville, Fla. Schussler liked the job and the new Piper Navajo that he flew—and the diversity of tasks he performed.

“It was a pretty typical, corporate flying job. You’re there to transport the owners and management: You’re the pilot, there’s the plane, off you go!” he said.

“Typically, you fly to one city, then another, and back to Austin. We kept the plane going four, five days a week. Once we got to a place—say, Fort Worth—I’d do something at the restaurant to help out. The boss would be talking to the manager, and I’d do whatever. I’d wait tables or work in the kitchen. It was an interesting combination: pilot-bartender.”

Schussler eventually flew for his own airplane charter service, near Waco, Texas. One client owned a chain of blue jeans stores in shopping malls. On a typical day, Schussler flew four or five executives in his Piper Seneca, starting early in the morning. They’d visit stores in towns not served by commercial airlines. Often, the executives were making surprise inspections and didn’t want the store managers to know they were in town, so they flew in, took a taxi from the airport, returned a few hours later to a waiting Schussler, piled back into the airplane, and flew on to the next town and store.

“We’d visit three to four stores in one day, and we’d do this several days in a row,” Schussler said. “So, it’d be, let’s say, 12 stores in three days. They said that if they were driving, it’d have taken them a month and cost a lot more money. So, they were very pleased.”

Asked what he most enjoyed about flying the executives, Schussler said, “I liked best that they paid me! Some had never used planes for business. They called me, and again. Some did it so much that they’d buy their own planes and hire their own pilots. I’d lose them as customers, but felt that I had introduced them to a new product line.”

Schussler now works as director of properties for Florida’s Sarasota Manatee Airport Authority, where he rents space to airlines and retail tenants. He also has a side business, selling hangar buildings for an Ohio manufacturing company to airport developers. He flies to see such clients in a Pulsar two-seater that he built in his garage over five years.

Schussler’s best flying experiences, though, came when he delivered special cargo for a charter client: Scott and White Hospital, in Temple, Texas. When babies were born prematurely in small towns that lacked specialized care, those hospitals called Scott and White’s neonatal care department, which contacted Schussler.

“I’d go to the airport, doctors from Scott and White Hospital would get to my airplane with a portable incubator, and we’d fly,” Schussler said. “An ambulance would meet us at that small-town airport, and [the doctors] would transfer the premature baby in the ambulance to the incubator. While I was flying back, they’d treat the baby. We’d land in Temple, an ambulance would meet us, and it would go to Scott and White Hospital.

“I’d sometimes ask, ‘Did the baby survive?’ They’d say, ‘Oh, yeah.’ We could get the babies there a whole lot faster than a car [could] from, let’s say, West Texas. The time was probably critical for those premature babies. Those babies were little. They were scary-looking. The assumption is that [the hospital] probably would not have had me fly them if there were a less expensive way. It must have been a critical need for the safety of the baby.

“I felt … Wow! Maybe I saved somebody. I’d like to believe that flying them probably saved their lives. Maybe those little people grew up and are doing great things.” —By Hillel Kuttler