Barry R. Willis
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Essays, reflections, and longer-form work spanning bluegrass, aviation, faith, and lived experience.

An introduction to The Banjo Pilot

You'll notice that bluegrass music sounds significantly different than other types of American music you can name:

  • Barbershop quartet,
  • rock and roll,
  • popular music of the '40s and 50s. Perry Como, Frank Sinatra, Mills Brothers
  • Doo wop
  • Country and western
  • Western (Sons of the Pioneers)
  • Old Timey
  • Folk music

Bluegrass was invented in 1945 when a very special banjo player named Earl Scruggs was invited to join Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys which had very popular performances on the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, TN every Saturday night.

It was Earl's special 3-finger style which brought Monroe's music to prominence. It is this very special coalescence of synergy which keeps bluegrass music in this original form prominent in bluegrass festivals today. To emphasize the importance of bluegrass music to you, perhaps you can contrast it to the festivals you can go to which feature rock and roll, or country and western, or barbershop quartets, rap, hard rock, or other music types which are important to Americans and the world. There aren't any.

To be fair, you can attend events which feature jazz or western music. But they pale in comparison to the quantity of places a person can enjoy bluegrass music each summer weekend in the eastern part of America.

The Banjo Pilot novel introduces a character named Duke Steel who is a locally famous banjo player based in his hometown of Mt. Airy, NC. That's right next to the Blue Ridge mountains. We also meet his daughter Lisa, his brother Gus, his father Pop, as well as Duke's wife Sweetie and their grandfather who bought their land, developed it, and build a cabin on it. The same cabin where Duke and Lisa and Gus where raised and lived when Lisa decides to tell the story of her famous father and put it into print.

Duke had a small band during the 1940s but was hired into Monroe's Blue Grass Boys in 1949. There he spent nearly a year, being taught true bluegrass by the father of BLUEGRASS, Bill Monroe.

After he left this band, Duke started up his own Pilot Mountain Boys band in 1950. He'd fly to many of his distant events with his wife Sweetie in a small, single-engine Beechcraft Bonanza. Occasionally, ten-year-old Lisa would go with them to these concerts.

Mind you that these were not festivals. Festivals didn't begin until 1965.

On one of these trips, when Lisa was not with them, They had an airplane accident. This is a cause of contention in the Steel family because Gus accused Duke of killing Sweetie. And it took twenty years before Duke was able to break out of the guilt involved here.

He joined a major airline in 1958 and worked there successfully for 20 years. After retiring in 1978, Lisa took her father to his first BLUEGRASS festival, which were going strong at the time.

It was at this festival that Duke and Lisa meet a fledgling bluegrass band called the Appalachian Flyers. He spends time with these kids, teaching them how to play bluegrass the correct way: the way Bill Monroe taught Duke to do it.

It is at this time that Lisa decides to write a biography about her father Duke. Lisa is the narrator and storyteller here.

We cover a lot of topics which are close to my heart: bluegrass music, flying and Christianity. I am an evangelical Christian, thus so is Duke and his family.

I began flying in 1965 and was a professional pilot for United Airlines when I retired at the age of 60 in 2005. I had a wonderful 17,000-hour career in many aspects of flying and have some wonderful stories to share with you in The Banjo Pilot. I share some of these stories through our fictional hero Duke Steel.

The book opens with a flying event, and ends with a flying event. After you read the book, you'll probably have an idea of whether you think Duke is a good pilot or not. After you reach this conclusion, please get back to me and we'll discuss it with you. My opinion may not be the same as yours.

*******

The Tragedy of America and a Symphony. An Article about Safety.

By Captain Barry R. Willis

Council 5 Safety Chairman. United Air Lines

Honolulu. September 11. 2001

It was such a beautiful flight over the Pacific in the middle of the night on the way home to Honolulu from Narita on United's flight 826, a Boeing 747-400. Captain Chuck Arthur and his two first officers, myself and Len Packett, had just received a silent message from Dispatch saying that there was some terrorist activity somewhere and that we should restrict our cockpit to no one.

That was simple. We could do that. Captain Arthur then began his scheduled two-hour break with the confidence that we could protect the door as ordered.

First Officer Packett and I reviewed the Security chapter of our Flight Operations Manual. The part on hijacking. Good review for what could affect us if things got out of hand. But it turns out that what was to occur was not included in our Manual. We'd have to "wing" it.

The company frequency was alive with chatter. Most of it was in Japanese. Occasionally we heard the names "United" and "Delta" mentioned. Packett recalls thinking that he should have requested them to speak English so we could all share their messages.

Soon a voice in American English announced that he was being required by his company to return to Narita. We didn't catch the name of his airline nor did we realize that something big was about to unfold. We did some quick figuring which indicated that we didn't have enough fuel to return to our point of departure. We could stop at Midway Island, but that didn't seem necessary at this point. No need. Yet.

Another message arrived after an hour or so. Dispatcher Sandy Reedy emphasized that NO ONE was to be allowed into the cockpit due the confirmation of terrorist activity in New York City. There was really no word to us what happened.

That was to be our last message from Dispatch. We were on our own to gather information of the unfolding events as they occurred.

We tuned into the powerful KHVH radio station out of Honolulu and continued monitoring the Company frequency to get a better idea of what was happening. As the picture became clear, we couldn't believe it: The New York City Trade Center had been destroyed, as well as a portion of the Pentagon. What is this? A motion picture? No word from Dispatch about what had happened yet. We didn't know yet if a United Airlines plane had been involved, but we did hear on the radio that an American Airlines flight was involved.

It was time to wake up Captain Arthur from his break.

This is the purpose of this article-an article about safety. For it is after Captain began his second shift, and Packett began his break, that things started to happen. It was a beautiful thing to watch: a well-trained and experienced Captain for United Airlines conducting the activities for his ohana-his family of pilots and flight attendants on board the Boeing 747-400 that night of tragedy. He solicited our contributions and opinions of nearly every activity and all of us involved had the impression that he not only listened to us, he actually used our inputs toward decisions which often were better than the sum of its inputs: We call this "synergy." All decision-makers should strive toward synergy; United's pilot training can help achieve this goal.

It was a time for patience, planning, selflessness and the execution of the result of United's training. Captain Arthur exhibited it all. This is not an article about Captain Arthur, really, but it does reflect how United's pilot and flight attendant training is really quite effective and up to the task of enhancing a Captain's skills beyond what he or she may envision he/she may have. If a pilot has been paying attention, if flight attendant have been paying attention to the training, if Customer Service Representatives have paid attention to what United has taught us, then we may be able to exhibit skills far beyond the ordinary. All we have to do is do our job and be open to a little creative thinking. That means paying attention to our manuals and taking our training seriously. Captain Arthur sure did. And it showed.

But this situation was different than our training. We are trained to generally comply with terrorists and to not resist our attackers. That would be in an attempt to preserve your own life and the other lives in the airplane. We are not, however, trained to react to what happened to us. Nor to react to the scenario that the hijackers were planning to use the plane as a destructive tool: a lethal weapon full of fuel and astonishing potential for incredible damage.

Our responses to this unfolding situation caused us to rely on some of our training, but mostly our common sense. And in this process, we were forced to compartmentalize our thinking in order to think clearly.

Captain Arthur's creative process and problem-solving capability was generally uninhibited by not having to fly the airplane. He turned that responsibility-say compartment-over to me. I tried to concentrate on this because we had some severe weather up ahead. And he gave Packett his specific orders and expected them to carried out. And Chief Purser Deedee did her job exceedingly well, too.

After a rather sparse briefing by our dispatchers (which I didn't hear), but after listening to what his first officers had to tell him about what we had learned of the situation, Captain Arthur briefed the Chief Purser. She then left the cockpit to solicit, clandestinely, passengers who appeared to be military. She found one and moved him to the top deck close to a good defense position for the cockpit door should any attack become evident. It became apparent that Captain Arthur was analyzing every possibility and that he was planning for the worse. He kept on asking Len and me if he was acting with overkill. We supported him completely and we learned what the difference between precaution and excessive caution is. His actions led us toward the recognition that the situation might be more serious than we thought. Certainly it was more serious than Dispatch had communicated to us.

Captain also solicited the assistance of a former U.S. Army First Sergeant (Delbert, who now is a well-qualified flight attendant) to remain in our cockpit to further defend our barrier should it be broken. He was shown where the crash axe was located. Other male flight attendants (Aaron and Wayne) were also deemed as large enough to help defend our position in the cockpit and they were pressed into action.

AIRINC called. We were notified that all United States airports were closed except to aircraft which declare an emergency. That was one of our easiest decisions; we declared an emergency.

Was this a movie we were in? It was seeming unreal! It was not, and Captain Arthur kept on fertilizing the creative-thought processes and continued coming up with ways to solicit input from all us underlings. The synergy was rampant. We could almost see the gears turn in Arthur's mind. Continued input led to continued creative ideas on how to handle this ever-changing situation.

Packett's law enforcement training would become invaluable to set up a critical defense of the cockpit door should that become necessary. Get the idea? Use a person's skills to its maximum. While the Captain and I were busy in the cockpit, Packett set up a physical defense for the cockpit door. There were suitcases used as barriers, empty wine bottles used as bludgeoning weapons, and the bad-ass attitude that if anyone should come up those stairs to the upper deck, they should treated as the enemy. He briefed the upstairs flight attendants that if anyone were to come up those stairs to the upper deck, they were to defend the cockpit "at all costs"! Packet's words to those under his command can be paraphrased thusly: "If a person comes up those stairs, it may be with the intent to kill the pilots. You are not to simply stop them, you are to take any action necessary to keep them from getting to the cockpit door.

To further isolate the cockpit from a potential hijacker, Captain Arthur asked that the Chief Purser DeeDee remove as many of the upper deck passengers as possible to seats away from the cockpit door. Packett and Deedee worked this "compartment," too. She used her Japanese speaking skills to help facilitate the moving of passengers away from the area of the cockpit door. If necessary, they'd explain to the passenger that we had to move people to other seats because of the airplane's weight and balance restrictions. None of the flight's passengers objected. They never suspected; they didn't expect a thing.

All the while, we debated how much information we should give to our passengers. If the passengers were to suspect that we were defending our position by publicly announcing our intentions, we feared that it might trigger one of two possible scenarios: First, if we had a terrorist on board, he might attack. Second, an announcement of that sort might trigger panic or irrational actions. We wanted neither.

It was decided to not tell the passengers anything until after landing. The last thing we needed was an emotional problem from an irrational passenger. It was agreed that Delbert would make the announcement after landing while the Captain and first officer manipulated the airplane toward the gate.

That was another excellent, synergistic decision.

Another decision we discussed was how much our Purser should tell the other flight attendants. We all kicked this idea around for a while and decided they should not know anything other than inform them of a heightened sense of hijacking and/or terrorism. They were simply told that some terrorists had done something somewhere and that they should review this area of their manuals if they had time. This worked out well, the entire crew feels now after the landing, because it kept any distractive thoughts from interfering with the work at hand. And it kept any panic or over-reacting from occurring.

After landing Captain Arthur asked Deedee to hold the flight attendants from leaving the airplane until he had a chance to de-brief them. The meeting was an explanation that we chose to keep them "in the dark" because things were unfolding so rapidly and, frankly, he wanted to avoid irrational responses to this situation. He apologized to them for not telling them more but they understood completely and were grateful that he handled the situation the way he did. Deedee then admitted that she was "in the loop" but was just too darn busy to tell everyone. That would have been an unnecessary use of her time. There was just too much to do and it would just be best if the non-critical flight attendants didn't know. At the Captain's meeting, they understood completely and were confident that Arthur handled the situation correctly.

After all is over and we are safe and sound on the ground, we now have a chance to ask what could be done better. While we may wonder if that flimsy cockpit door is really adequate for the job. And it seems to me that security of this type would be better handled at the Airport Security level, long before they board an airplane. If that were done properly, perhaps the flimsy cockpit door would be adequate. Another thing: When Dispatch instructed us to disconnect the airphone system, I wonder if the phones should have been left available to our passengers... That way they could report to the rest of the world what's happening to them on the airplane.

One last thought. Why did I mention a symphony? It's because of the way Captain Arthur handled the situation. He handled the other crewmembers as members of an orchestra, each person playing his/her part. While we read from the music, he orchestrated the entire ensemble toward efficient accomplishment of the symphony. It was a beautiful thing. All of our Captains should be equally skilled.

****

From: Barry R. Willis,

A Letter to IBMA June 1, 2001

A City of Our Own

Quick, name a city associate with jazz. I come up with Chicago, Portland OR, and New Orleans. Now, name a city associated with Dixieland: New Orleans comes to mind. Blues? Memphis, Chicago. Country music? Branson or Nashville.

Now, name a city associated with bluegrass. Nope, Nashville and Washington, D.C., only have a couple of venues which embrace bluegrass. Nashville couldn't be it because it's too involved with country music and I wonder about their motives (they've succeeded in destroying much of what country music should be). Washington's association with bluegrass is of the past, not the present. Owensboro? Not really. Only IBMA people would possibly recognize the city's association with bluegrass. It's certainly not recognized as a bluegrass town outside our community.

Actually, then, there is no city which can be identified with bluegrass as the cities above are identified with a certain kind of music.

Bluegrass needs its own city! Thus the reason for this letter. I have some ideas on this topic and hope you will spend a few minutes with me reading this letter, then follow it up with IBMA Board members for further discussion.

In this letter we'll discuss which city we could choose as our own and some ideas on how to do it.

To make this idea reality, we'll have to concentrate our efforts through the IBMA; it has the organization to make this possible and I believe the idea should be a prime function of the Association. I believe the Mission Statement concurs with this idea. It reads, "The International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA) is a professional trade association dedicated to promoting and expanding the success of bluegrass music."

Which cities might we choose? A little analysis on your part might come up with a couple candidate cities: those which might be potentially linked with our wonderful music. Nashville? Washington? Branson? Owensboro? Or even Grass Valley, California? How about Louisville?

I believe that Louisville should be our city of choice so I'll address this discussion accordingly. I must eliminate Owensboro from the discussion for several reasons including lack of easy geographical access, convention facilities and venue infrastructure. Only the International Bluegrass Music Museum is a drawing card there, not a substantial population base or any of the other needs to make this happen.

Let's take a cursory look at the city. Louisville is a nice, clean city with an excellent transportation system: easy access to the rest of the world by road, airlines or even river. We now hold our Trade Show and the World of Bluegrass there and plan to do so in the foreseeable future. Louisville's WFPK has its own bluegrass show every Sunday night with local Berk Bryant as its host. Berk has been a bluegrass radio icon in the area for nearly thirty years now. The Kentucky Fried Bluegrass Festival was a part of the city for many years and many, many folks can recall attending the festival and the band contest associated with it. And Louisville is still in Kentucky, a requisite for many bluegrass aficionados who prefer to keep it in the state from which bluegrass music got its name. And I think the Louisville city planners and Chamber of Commerce would heartily embrace the idea described here.

So, how do we do it? Let's outline a few preliminary steps-goals, if you will:

  • Those involved should understand that such an idea as this one takes years to pay off, starting from this letter to the involvement of the IBMA and other organizers, then followed up by bluegrass promoters and booking agents making a concentrated effort to send bluegrass bands to Louisville. The IBMA should offer its help to Louisville in getting our bands into its town; don't expect the town to know how to contact our bands.
  • IBMA should make this a priority. We should embrace it and promote Louisville as "our" city in our promotional activities.
  • When meeting with Louisville officials, the IBMA should send in its "big guns" (top officials) for this one, starting with the premise that the city is the most important factor in this idea and essential for the idea to succeed. The first meeting with these folks should at least be with our president, executive director and secretary.
  • Approach not only the Chamber of Commerce of Louisville but also its clubs such as Kiwanis, Rotary, etc.. They could wield considerable power if called upon to do so.
  • These above named organizations would then, in turn, contact bar owners and venue owners about this plan to have bluegrass music regularly in their town. They should be enticed to embrace this idea with all the vigor at their disposal. This is a most-critical aspect of this idea if it is to succeed.
  • The Education in Schools Committee should be actively involved. Let's start 'em young; enable them to know and appreciate bluegrass music at an early age. By the time the kids grow up, they would actually seek the bars and other events which include bluegrass music.
  • The identification of Louisville as a bluegrass city would be helped along significantly by street banners declaring that the city is now associated with bluegrass. Travel brochures would include the declaration of Louisville as a "bluegrass city."
  • Continuation of the Galt House as host of the World of Bluegrass.

After all these things have occurred, you'll find more bluegrass books in stores and libraries, more bluegrass music for sale, more bars and restaurants signing on for a bluegrass band on a Saturday night or even for a weekday.

We may eventually see our Museum moved from Owensboro to Louisville. But since there is a lot of money and prior agreements involved between the City of Owensboro and the IBMM, this may take a long while to occur, if ever. As much as I'd like our museum to be in Louisville, it may never actually happen because of the strings attached. I wouldn't count on this happening.

Folks, I believe the IBMA should embrace this idea as its own. If you agree, contact the Board of Directors members and discuss it with them. They are: Andy Owens, Mike Drudge, Art Menius, Kirk Brandenberger, Bill Evans, Andrea Compton, Jim Winger, Bev Paul, Murphy Henry, Terry Woodward, Nancy Cardwell, Missy Raines, David Crow, Greg Cahill, Jed Malischke, Terry Herd, Kitsy Kuykendall and Wayne

Bledsoe. The officers are: President Pete Wernick, VP Bertie Sullivan, Secretary Saburo Watanabe Inoue, Treasurer Brenda Clayton and Legal Counsel Larry Harrington.

Sincerely in bluegrass,