Carl F. Brady.

• Author: Richardson, Jeffrey
• Position: Profile

In the late 1940s, nobody knew much about flying helicopters, including civil servants charged with regulating the new "ships." Carl E Brady remembers the Civil Aeronautics Administration flight instructor who was supposed to teach and license him to fly a chopper. The instructor had never flown a helicopter before. He gave Brady a manual.

"He told me to read the book, then tell him how to do it. Then he told me to go fly and come back and tell him how well I did, " Brady recalls.

Brady was drawn to flying at an early age. "I got interested because I was fascinated by anything that flew. That goes back to when I was eight. I was enamored of Lindbergh's trip across the ocean in 1927, " he recalls.

His family's struggle with economic hard times in Depression-era Arkansas didn't dampen Brady's dream. In 1938, he headed west to Yakima, Wash., seeking to improve his fortunes. On the eve of World War 11, he learned to fly and served as a civilian flight instructor for the Army Air Corps Cadets before enlisting in the Army's Ferrying Command.

Like many aviators, Brady has always displayed a mixture of authentic modesty about his talents and exploits and a flair for daring stunts and practical jokes. It was during the war that Brady astonished his parents by buzzing their Springdale, Ark., home five times in a P-40 he was ferrying from Brownsville, Tex., to the East Coast.

By war's end, Brady had flown just about everything the Army could put in the air. Then he met the helicopter, a new kind of flying machine barely known to the general public. As a flyer and aspiring businessman, Brady quickly grasped the potential peacetime applications of helicopter flying and set about convincing the rest of the world with evangelical zeal.

But if the chopper challenge was irresistible, it also offered its share of heartache and struggle. -It was a pretty tough business to start up with helicopters. They were unproven and unlicensed by the CAA until 1947, " Brady remembers.

He joined with two entomologists to form Economy Pest Control in Yakima at the same time Bell I began experimenting with helicopters an Says Brady, "We hocked everything we e together enough money to buy our first helicopter. It cost $29,500. Actually we lease-purchased it; we couldn't afford to buy anything. "

Brady's relationship with Bell marked the beginning of a fruitful decades-long alliance with helicopter manufacturers that saw Brady continually pushing the choppers to new frontiers...