Got a minute ... with George Wells

So you are a retired airline pilot. What airline did you work for?

Yes, I am retired, and I worked for American Airlines.

My aviation career started when I was very young in grade school. World War II was going on and I heard stories about fighters and fighter airplanes, pilots and my dream was to become a fighter pilot. And that was the seed of my aviation career.

Everybody that becomes a fighter pilot has to go through a lot of tests. One of the most severe ones was getting into the program in the first place. I took ROTC at the University of Illinois and I was accepted into the pilot program in the Air Force after my four years at the University of Illinois.

I worked for American for just about 30 years.

The longest time I’ve spent in a fighter is 10 and a half hours flying from California to Spain non-stop with many, many air-to-air refuelings. The longest time I’ve ever spent in an airline is in a DC 10, flying from Frankfurt, Germany, to Dallas, Texas, with a big headwind, and it took us 14 and a half hours.

The fighter jets I flew were the F-100. I flew that in Europe for three years, and then I was transferred back to the United States. I then flew the F-104 Star Fighter for about four years. I accumulated about 1,000 hours in that airplane, which included a tour flying combat in North Vietnam.

After a while, you get kind of used to rather risky or scary situations, and I’ve had so many of them, I can’t pick one out. But basically, I’ve never had to bail out of a fighter and I’ve never had an accident in a commercial airliner. I probably came close to getting in big trouble in fighters about once a week, but the airliners are extremely safe, and it actually gets to be a little boring after a while. People who complain about airlines being unsafe when they come within three miles of each other or something, it's not really based on knowledge. The airlines are just super-safe.

No. I had a Cessna 182 with a couple friends when I lived up in the Chicago area. When I came down here, I decided to give up flying and I bought a couple motorcycles, so now I ride motorcycles.

I really don’t miss it too much. I’ve got 23,000 hours of flying time, and that was about enough (laughs).

I just love the freedom of flying. Flying fighters was unbelievably exciting. I was in on many, many things that really kept our (nation’s) attention, such as the Cuban Missile Crisis, all kinds of problems around the world that I participated in, and the airlines, American Airlines, was probably the finest airline in the world. The management was wonderful, they respected you; as a captain, you made the decisions and they backed you up. It was just an outstanding place to work.