Bill Owens always wanted to fly and, finally, he saw the writing in the sky

Originally published Saturday, February 26, 2000

By JON HAHN  
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

When an Internet Service Provider (ISP) is about to crash, you've gotta hope someone like Bill Owens can save it, same as he's done while flying a twin-engine aircraft with one engine crapped out.

And if it's going down like a crop-duster that's run out of fuel and daylight -- he's done that, too -- you want someone who can do some seat-of-the-pants reckoning to get you down without losing anything and back up again.

Owens looks like any other 57-year-old family man living in a cul-de-sac cluster of middle-class homes not far from the Everett Mall. Well, maybe a tad better-looking, with a full head of curly, prematurely gray hair. Could be some of that gray came from investing in an ISP that nearly crashed in financial trouble before he stepped in and kept it running.

That's his day job, but Bill Owens is first and foremost a dyed-in-denim, back-country, seat-of-the-pants, crop-dusting pilot who gained enough altitude and attitude to become a top-notch corporate jet pilot, flight instructor and aircraft mechanic.

And in his spare time -- which seems to be as rare as a clear blue Seattle sky in February -- he's a writer. A skywriter ... one of those very few fellows who writes advertising slogans (do you remember seeing huge "007" digits in the sky when that spy movie opened here recently?) and even marriage proposals about 8,000 feet over our heads.

Catching up with Owens isn't any easier now that he's no longer flying corporate jets across the country or along pipelines. While his wife of 30-something years, Sandee, works a regular job, Bill and their daughter, Candice Sobota, run Adept Online Services Inc., an ISP covering much of Western Washington. On those long-lit summer evenings and weekends, Bill might be skywriting from his base at the Monroe Airport. And in his spare time, he does Federal Aviation Administration-certified aircraft maintenance, repair and inspections.

Any time left after that might be spent building black-powder firearms.

This all sorta starts back in Cheyenne and Casper, Wyo., where Bill grew up and spent much of his time hanging on the fence near the local Air Force base where his father worked as a mechanic. "I used to ride my bike there and hang on the fence and dream of becoming a pilot," he said.

Learning in the fifth grade that he required glasses shot down the Air Force fighter pilot dream, and Bill eventually went to college as an electrical engineering major. "But I kept seeing little airplanes on the text book pages," he said. So he joined the Air National Guard in the 1960s, and while they trained him to be an aircraft mechanic he began learning to fly in a base aero-club in Wichita Falls, Texas.

Later, he found work as a utility lineman in California. "I was saving money because I'd fallen in love, but she (the woman, not an airplane) took off, so I took my $600 in savings and went right out to the airport at San Carlos and learned to fly." (Does all this start to sound like a country and western song lyric?)

Well sir, a little "Learn To Be A Crop-Dusting Pilot" advertisement lured him to Lubbock, Texas -- after stopping back in Wyoming to borrow the required $2,500 fee from his mother. There were dozens of applicants, including Bill, all of whom paid the non-refundable fee. "The fellow knew that the real money wasn't in crop-dusting; it was in training pilots who wanted to be crop dusters," Bill said.

Bill learned so well and so fast that he qualified as a flight instructor there. But he never was hired to crop-dust. "And since my fee guaranteed me so many hours of flying time, I just borrowed one of those old tail-draggers and took off across country, looking for a crop-dusting job. Slept under the plane in sleeping bags at night and went all over, but never did find work."

In the late 1960s, he finally got a crop-spraying job flying throughout the Southwest. He was flying WWII-vintage TBM's, spraying crops, sage brush and fighting forest and range fires, when he met Sandee. "She was a waitress at a chicken restaurant in Casper, Wyo., and I met her the first day I was in town," he said.

Sandee was pregnant when she started working as the ground flagger for Bill, setting and moving the flags that showed him what sections of field to spray or dust. But it wasn't long before Bill, now based out of Roswell, N.M., started flying corporate jets as well as crop-dusters, flying executives and uranium mine workers and pipeline workers all over the Southwest. "We'd be landing and taking off from roads or small strips no wider than the wheels of the airplane," he recalled.

They were doing well enough for Bill to pick up a Super Cub at a sheriff's sale in 1980. It was while in Roswell that a dermatologist friend who had invented a sunscreen was looking for a way to advertise it at sportsman's shows, "and I suggested skywriting," Bill said.

The equipment didn't cost much -- it's just a special light oil injected into the engine cylinders that produces the whitish exhaust -- but learning to skywrite from a little How-To book ain't no Sunday afternoon pleasure flight. "Sandee was on the ground talking to me on a CB radio when I did the first trial runs. I remember her saying from down there: 'That looks like . . . !' "

And there were times when he'd go up to spell the name of a local restaurant in football-field-size letters "and I'd forget a letter . . . or the wind would blow away a letter or short word before I finished." But one of the more successful skywriting jobs was a marriage proposal over the Evergreen Fair Ground in Monroe. "And the guy said she accepted," Bill said.

SKYWRITER/Bill Owens 425-347-6605 or Skywriter@wiredweb.com Adept Online Services Inc., 425-267-9630 or www.wiredweb.com