Aviation honors one of its own

Joe Kernan
Posted 7/24/14

Looking at Gene Bielecki, you’d never imagine he was a famous Rhode Island aviator. He has a mild, polite demeanor, hardly the romantic, dashing image of a pilot.

But, when his many friends and …

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Aviation honors one of its own

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Looking at Gene Bielecki, you’d never imagine he was a famous Rhode Island aviator. He has a mild, polite demeanor, hardly the romantic, dashing image of a pilot.

But, when his many friends and former students get together to tell stories about him, the most common preface to the anecdotes about him begin with, “Well, I guess the statute of limitations has run out, so I can tell you this without Gene getting into trouble…”

And that was how it went last Saturday, when at least 100 people looked for seats or ended up standing as a long line of friends and colleagues got up to praise their old friend and mentor before Rhode Island Airport Corporation CEO Kelly Fredericks presented him with proclamations, declarations and just plain appreciations in a corner of the main hangar of the North Central Airport in Lincoln.

“My father urged me to come to this thing today,” said Bielecki’s son Brian. “‘Just to make sure at least a few people show up for the ceremony,’ he said to me. Well, he didn’t have to worry about that. He wasn’t expecting something like this, but I’m not surprised. It’s amazing how many people are here for him.”

Bill DiBiasio, a Warwick native and former Bielecki student, was one of the “statute of limitations” speakers.

“I used to wash airplanes just to get in some lessons with him,” he said. “If I got to the airport after 6 a.m. in the morning, I was late. If I went home before midnight, I was a slacker.”

While all of the speakers acknowledged a certain disciplinary rigor in their training with Bielecki, none of them declared it unreasonable or mean-spirited, and almost all had stories about how Bielecki could be flexible if he had faith in your abilities.

“I came to the airport on my 16th birthday,” said DiBiasio, “and Gene told me to get into that plane and fly it to Norwood … I had my pilot’s license by the time I was 17, I had my commercial license when I was 18. That’s how good he was as a teacher.”

Jack Keenan, the retired program manager for the Federal Aviation Administration’s Program Manager Safety Program, also spoke of the thousands and thousands of pilots that Bielecki trained and tested, hinting strongly that it was humanly impossible to certify that many pilots in a lifetime.

“According to the FAA rules, you can only test and certify two pilots in a day,” said Keenan, as he turned to his mentor, “Come on, Gene!”

There’s no question of Bielecki’s proficiency reviewer, as some of the most successful pilots in Rhode Island can attest.

“Although I never got to fly on a flight test with Gene,” said DiBiasio, “I know that all of us are better pilots, and better people because of Gene.”

Retired pilot, flight instructor and friend, Ken Brown recalled the first time he flew into North Central Airport in a Cessna that was faster than anything he had flown up until then.

“I was coming in too fast and I had to go around again, and again,” said Brown. “When I finally got down, Gene, who had been watching the whole thing from the tower, came over and said, ‘That’s the first time you flew one of those … isn’t it?’ Well, he taught me how to fly that plane and a hell of a lot of other things as well.”

When they opened the floor up to other people, another former student had a story.

“This time, it’s with his wife in mind,” said the man. “I remember I was at the airport one day and I found Gene trying to get a motorcycle off a trailer. He was tugging at it, and huffin’ an puffin’ and I asked him what he was doing. He said, ‘I’m trying to get this motorcycle off this trailer … can you help me?’ and I said sure, and then I put the bike in neutral and rolled it off the trailer … Then Gene says, ‘You know about motorcycles?’ and I said, ‘Yeah,’ and he said, ‘Show me.’ So I ran through the gears for him and told him what the clutch did and in no time at all, he was on the bike and riding around the airport. I asked him why he was leaving the bike at the airport and he said, ‘Because I can’t let my wife see it.’”

The professional positions and certificates Bielecki has held could take hours to reel off, but it is safe to say that he qualified or qualified other pilots for airlines, corporate aviation, general aviation of various engine configurations, as well as gliders. He was inducted into the Rhode Island Aviation Hall of Fame in 2009. He is a founding member of the Rhode Island Pilots Association. He has about 30,000 hours of flying time under his belt, which, according to his friend Ken Brown, is the equivalent of “14 years of 40-hour weeks in the air.”

But some of the adventures and achievements got short shrift on Saturday. Not mentioned was how he and a friend in Florida flew a B-17 from Fort Lauderdale to the Bahamas to pick up a load of cucumbers. It was long after the war but people were still maintaining war birds for their historical value.

“Cucumbers were in short supply that year and people were getting them from the Bahamas,” he said. “We flew over and loaded the B-17 up with cucumbers … the floor, the bomb bay, anywhere they’d fit, and flew them back to Lauderdale. It was great.”

Less fun and much more perilous was a flight he and another pilot made to France in the 1960s.

“We decided we wanted to fly to Orleans in France in a twin engine Piper Apache in November,” he said. “Our original plan was to go the usual route, to the Azores and then onto France. But the weather didn’t allow that and someone said we could actually make it by the northern route. People usually fly to Europe in the summertime but we were convinced we could make it. When we landed in Iceland, it was front-page news in their newspapers. No one flies to Europe in a small plane in November. As we were walking away from the plane, we could hear the ice melting and falling off the wings.”

That was the kind of flying adventure Bielecki had been dreaming about since he was a child.

“I first caught the flying bug when I was around 9 years old,” he recalled. “A plane was having engine trouble and had to land in Lonsdale. We all flocked to see it. I was surprised to see and feel the fabric. I didn’t actually get inside the plane, but I did get a look into the cockpit and saw the stick and the rudder and I was hooked. I went home and did an essay about how to fly a plane and I had never even been inside one.”

After a stint in the Army as a radio instructor at Fort Benning in Georgia, Bielecki returned to Rhode Island in 1947, went to flight school, and soloed in 1948. The rest, as they say, is Rhode Island aviation history. Now, when pilots fly into North Central Airport, they will see a plaque on the wall, a “Thank you” note from all the pilots in the state.

“As you may have noticed, the building here is named for Chet Spooner,” remarked Ken Brown on Saturday. “Not many people will remember Chet Spooner, but they will know that the building was named for him. When pilots land here in the future, they’ll see that plaque dedicated to Gene and say to themselves, ‘He must be one hell of a guy to receive that honor,’ and they’ll be right.”

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