John Anthony – thoughts and recollections

I first met John Anthony at Great Northern Airlines in late 1976. I was 21 and he was a wild 18 year old. He pulled up in a fluorescent yellow/green 1974 Chevy Nova with loud pipes and fat tires.

He was the boss’s kid, so I thought – oh no – this is going to be a real pain…

Well, it wasn’t. John turned out to be a not only a great guy to work with but one of my best friends as well.

We worked together at GNA on the night shift. Together we learned the Lockheed Electra and how to make them dispatch reliably each morning.

This was all flight line work outside with NO HANGAR.

Early on, during the winter of 1976, we were assigned to pull the No. 1 Engine on an Electra. We had a very basic job card and absolutely zero experience on engine changes. We did great and pulled it in record time….except we failed to disconnect the turbine inlet temperature wiring and managed to rip the wires out by the roots. The boss was NOT HAPPY the following morning as the flight was cancelled.

We also found time to get into a lot of mischief and a little trouble in many different ways. Some I really can’t go into here…

One night John showed me a trick he learned working around Zantop in Ypsilanti:

The oxygen / acetylene filled garbage bag “party favor” - it was VERY impressive when ignited!

We worked together at GNA for several years and ended up bachelor pad roommates along with some GNA flight crew at a great house down in Bootlegger’s Cove. There were many good times there, right on Cook Inlet.

We had quite the crew at GNA – John’s dad (John Anthony Sr.) was Directory of Quality Control. And we had a revolving door of Directors of Maintenance – the company tended to chew them up and spit them out.

But the core mechanics alumni have a fairly impressive list of accomplishments in the airline business – and it’s a tough business these days.

Out of the ones I’m aware of:

3 Directors of Maintenance
1 Director of Quality Control
1 FAA Inspector
1 QC Manager
4 Maintenance Technicians with major airlines

The really smart ones got out of the airline business and went into printing, etc.

John and I worked together at GNA until Alaska International Air bought us out in 1979. After the buyout and subsequent layoffs, John and I and 8 others were the only ones left from GNA’s 40 person maintenance department.

At AIA we moved to the Herc world. Again John and I shared the night shift and took care of up to 5 aircraft by ourselves.

We had some interesting field trips during our times at AIA.

One involved going to Dillingham to rescue a Herc with two flat tires. We flew over in an ERA Twin Otter filled with our tools and two spare Herc tires.

The AIA Herc had blown two tires on the LH side during landing and now sat halfway down the runway, blocking all large aircraft traffic, during the height of fish hauling season.

The Twin Otter could easily land on half the runway and we got to work right away.

A small crowd quickly gathered and asked, “HOW LONG is this going to take?”

They had loads of fresh fish on their aircraft sitting at the airport that were in danger of spoiling!

We could see the aircraft was too low for the jack we’d brought because the tires were worn away to where the wheel rims were on the ground.

Simple – we’ll just dig a whole in the gravel runway until the jack fits.

“NO!” said the airport police, “we’re going to pave this next week. You can’t dig a hole here.”

John gave it some thought and quickly came up with a solution – Non aircraft types may have some troubling following these details:

The Herc has tandem main landing gear; one tire in front of the other.

We let the nitrogen charge out of the rear MLG strut.

Then we chained the strut up in the collapsed position.

By manipulating the Herc’s drive-on rear cargo loading ramp in the full down position we were able to leverage the aircraft with the ramp and use the forward gear as the fulcrum.

This lifted the collapsed and chained rear strut off the ground enough to get our jack underneath. Pure hero genius – that was John!

John used to say that he looked up to me as an aircraft mechanic mentor and that I taught him everything he knew about troubleshooting electrical and avionics systems faults on aircraft and how to read wiring diagrams.

Well, I may have given him a few pointers and steered him in the right direction, but really John was, without a doubt, the most naturally talented mechanic I’ve worked with in my 32 year career. He had an innate ability to look at any mechanical device with a problem, quickly analyze it and come up with the best method to fix it. On top of that, he could go and accomplish the fix faster than anyone else.

We both got married in 1982 (to women – not each other) and shortly thereafter received a great wedding present from AIA - laid off due to lack of work (gotta love those airlines). We both drifted into different orbits around the airport – John ended up at NAC and I went to RAA.

When John went to Tennessee I dropped in to see him there over a weekend. He was doing subcontracted turns on FedEx 727s.

We stayed in touch as he moved on to Spirit Airlines in Detroit. As we both advanced to management positions we stayed in sporadic contact as our work lives became busier and more hectic. We would call and email and commiserate on the pitfalls and stresses of management and how to deal with them.

One cool technique he used with his newly issued Blackberry, when it buzzed incessantly with new messages, was to just throw it in the trunk of his car and close the trunk lid.

During these phone calls there was often talk of misty memories and longing for the good old days when we just had to FIX airplanes, rather than deal with the FAA, paperwork, pointless meetings, personnel issues, and upper management.

I last saw John in September 2000 when I stopped in Ypsilanti for a couple of days on business. When we met, the first thing he said was –
“Hey Paul, man we’re getting FAT!”

We’d planned to meet up in Detroit again later this month, when I had a one day layover set up between business trips.

His passing made me reconsider a few things – Mainly, don’t put things off!

Just do it.

John was a very charming and funny guy who could always find a way to make you laugh and I’ll surely miss him for a very long time. He would do anything to help a friend. I’m honored to have known him and counted him as a true friend.

Bye John. We’ll miss you.

Paul Willing