Hopwood gets Wright Bros. award from FAA

Gary Exelby photo Glen Hopwood receives the Wright Brothers Master Pilot Award from Nadine Yeager, the FAA's Memphis District's Safety team program manager for flight standards.

Glen Hopwood is getting some well-deserved recognition.

There are not many people who can boast of more than 50,000 flying hours, or at least 50 years of flying. So several of Hopwood's relatives, friends and students brought his exploits to the attention of the Federal Aeronautics Administration (FAA).

And Monday, the FAA presented Hopwood with the Wright Brothers Master Pilot Award at Hickory Log Restaurant. "It's issued to people who have been flying for more that 50 years," said Nadine Yeager of the FAA in presenting Hopwood the award.

Yeager is the Memphis District's Safety team program manager for flight standards. "[This award is presented to very few people," she said, "and those who get it have their names put on a Roll of Honor in Washington, D.C."

Yeager said there are only about 150 recipients of the two-year-old award.

Hopwood got his start in aviation courtesy of what was then the Army Air Force in the closing days of World War 2. He was a flight engineer on a B-29 Superfortress and flew a total of six missions against Japan before that country surrendered to end the war.

But as an actual pilot, Hopwood began flying after his discharge in March 1946. He soloed the first time in July 1946, and continued.flight instruction under the GI Bill to receive instructor ratings in 1947.

Hopwood, now 82, also became a crop-dusting pilot in 1948, and flew his last season in 1998. He has been a rated flight instructor for 50 years, and from the 1960s to the 1980s he owned and operated SEMO Aviation, contracted to fly air mail.

As if that were not enough, Hopwood also operated SEMO Airways, an air commuter service in Missouri and Arkansas. The service operated more than 14 years with a perfect safety record.

Hopwood has flown aircraft as diverse as the North American T-6 and T-28 training aircraft, the Beech 18, Piper Cherokee 6, DeHavilland Heron, Piper Navajo, Aerostar, MU-2, DC-3, Cessna Caravan, Cessna 150 and Cessna 172. And in those 50,000 flying hours, the only accidents he has had were agriculture-related.

But that doesn't mean he was boring at the stick, either. "I remember one time Dad had taken me up in a [Cessna] 172," said son Rance Hopwood, himself a pilot and on hand for the award.

"And there was this fox on the grass in between the runways."

So, the younger Hopwood said, Glen Hopwood took the aircraft down very low, as the fox tried to run across the runway. "And he'd cut him off [from running]," Rance Hopwood said.

So the fox ran back the other way. "And he'd cut him off again," Rance said.

After five to 10 minutes of that, he continued, the fox gave up trying to run away, and "just lay there, panting and looking up at us."

Neither fox nor aircraft suffered any damage from the activity.

gexelby@dailystatesman.com.