Come Thursday, Tim Hardage will assume the controls and fly it under a new banner: Rocket Aviation. The sale was approved by the city-county airport board last week.  

Hardage is the 40-year-old son of 62-year-old Bill Hardage, who died in the crash of his Mooney Cadet on March 25, 2006, as he was flying it to Plainview from California where he had purchased it.

“Dad would have been a partner in Rocket Aviation,” said Hardage. “The Mooney was the last version of the Aircoupe — his favorite plane. He owned all its different versions and wanted to complete the series. He’d buy them, work on them, fly them and sell them.” 

Tim Hardage began flying on his own at age 19. He owned Hardage Aerial Spraying in Hale Center for nine years, served as chief pilot for former Texas House Speaker Pete Laney and did legislative work in Austin for 10 years.

“I’ve seen different airports around the country and I want to make some changes — small changes,” he said, jokingly adding that it will be “a family operation for the cheap labor.”

He emphasized, however, that he plans on keeping the current roster of nine employees. “You bet,” he said. “And I’m really going to keep the Miller tradition going.”

James Miller opened Miller Flying Service in 1944 and his son, Marlin Miller, has operated it for a number of years after he and Marge Mitchell bought a half-interest from Johnny Gantt in September 1971. She sold her interest to Miller in 2002 and is now retired from the business.

It gained fame as the Bellanca Capital of the World “because since 1965, we sold about 75 percent of the new Bellanca production to the present,” said Miller.

“We also sold and serviced a number of used Bellancas over the years, and we were the leading sales outlet for the twin-engine Aerostar from 1973 to 1980. Plainview  was the word-of-mouth place to come for maintenance and to buy a plane.”

The unusual thing about Bellancas, Miller noted, is that they’ve got wooden wings “which are really strong and don’t suffer the stress-fatigue that metal wings do.”

A Bellanca was Charles Lindbergh’s first choice for his historic New York-to-Paris flight in 1927. But litigation of some sort at the time prevented him from using it. Instead, he flew a highly-modified version of the Ryan M-2 and named it “The Spirit of Saint Louis.”  

Two weeks later, Clarence Chamberlain — who had been in a $25,000 competition with Lindbergh and others for the first person to cross the Atlantic non-stop in a plane — flew the longer distance from New York to Berlin in a Bellanca named the “Columbia” and accompanied by a passenger: company owner at the time, Charles Levine.

“Chamberlain didn’t get much recognition because he wasn’t the first,” said Miller, who started flying at 12, soloed at 16, got his private license at 17, his commercial license at 18 and “began spraying crops that year.”  

Unaware of a leaking gas line, he once crashed on the side of the Plainview runway. He wasn’t seriously injured, but made the paper “with bigger headlines than the end of the war — at least I felt like it, anyway.”

According to Miller, the many celebrities and notables who’ve come to Plainview to buy a plane, have one worked on or just to visit include “longtime customer” Chuck Russell, founder of the Visa credit card company who bought three Bellancas; baseball great Mickey Mantle; coach Barry Switzer of Cowboy and University of Oklahoma football fame; NASCAR driver Tony Stewart; and eight-time national bull-riding champion Donnie Gay “who bought several planes from us.”

One day, Peanut Corporation of America President Stewart Parnell from Lynchburg, Va., flew in for fuel and a visit and happened to mention that he was looking to locate a peanut processing plant in this area, and Miller directed him to Hale County State Bank President Brian Pohlmeier, who was on the board of the Plainview-Hale County Industrial Board.

“As it turned out,” said Miller, “Brian had been Parnell’s loan officer for several of the planes he had bought and it wound up with the peanut plant locating in the old Jimmy Dean plant.”

At 92, Marge Mitchell suffers from age-related macular degeneration, but her mind is just as sharp and clear as it ever was. At one time, she chaired the board of the Bellanca Mfg. Co. in Alexandria, Minn.

“We built the planes, sold them and flew them,” she said. “The Bellanca is one of the safest and finest airplanes ever built. Miller Flying Service and James Miller are legends. They were known all over the continent. I’m elated that Tim is taking over because the Miller legend will be carried on under him.”

Miller said he plans to spend his retirement taking care of his 98-year-old mother “and do some traveling.”

(Richard Orr is a Herald correspondent. Contact him at royko@sptc.net)