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Leisure Travel ENJOYING LIFE WITH YOUR PLANE
The Wind Beneath My Wings
Matty Mozzor was a passenger on a small Beech commuter airplane several years ago heading to White Plains airport from Albany.
It was summer and the weather was horrible, and after two missed approaches at White Plains, the pilot announced that she was taking the airplane back to Albany.
As he got off the airplane, Matty thanked the Captain for her efforts trying to land in White Plains, saying he knew how difficult it was because his father, Al Mozzor, was a flight instructor. The captain laughed and said that she knew Al; he had been one of her instructors. Everyone knew Al.
“I travel all over the country, and you meet someone and you talk about old times, and sure enough, his name comes up,” says Dennis Doyle, Captain of a Leer jet for a Farmingdale, NY, charter company. “He had a wonderful ability to teach. Some people are good pilots, but they couldn't sit there and tell you how or why they do what they do. Al had that.”
From the beginning, Al wanted to be a pilot. His mother didn’t want him getting mixed up in aviation so he became an insurance broker in New York. It was a job he hated.
On May 30, 1965, at the age of 34, he logged his first flight in a Cessna 150. By the
early 70’s he was giving flight instruction on the weekends at Mac Arthur Airport in Islip, NY. By 1974 he had enough students to quit his insurance business and open his own aviation company, Air Transport Corp, which offered flight instruction and aircraft rentals.
Al briefly flew for a local charter company, flying a turboprop from Long Island to the casinos in Atlantic City. But his wife Sandra didn’t like his traveling, and so he quit the charter job and channeled his enthusiasm for flight into his students. During the next 25 years, Al gave more than 17,700 hours of flight instruction out of a T-hangar at Farmingdale’s Republic Airport.
Sandra ran the office out of their home, while Al spent his days at the airport, teaching and talking about airplanes. They were a team.
When he met Al, Doyle was a private pilot who owned a tannery business. It was Al who pushed him to become an professional pilot.
“You could probably speak to a hundred other people who would say the same thing--Al was responsible for them being in aviation. I can’t imagine how many people’s lives he touched.”
Al made you feel good about flying; he reassured you when you were nervous, and teased you when you weren’t. He was a sweet old man who was afraid of nothing, yet he never made you feel small when you couldn’t do something he wanted you to do. “He understood human nature and people in general; he had a good read on people,” Doyle says.
Al loved flying, and the only thing he loved more than being in the air, was sharing his enthusiasm for flying. “He loved to instruct, he didn’t like the classroom, he just loved the one-on-one,” says Ron Holtzman, Al’s son-in-law and frequent flying companion. “He liked to share flying with other people, it was just the satisfaction of passing along his knowledge.”
“Most people don’t do it as a career, and the reason why is because it isn’t a well-paid profession,”
Ron says. “When you learn from somebody like Al, it’s priceless.”
“I think he lived vicariously through his students. He was so proud when one of his students moved up professionally,” Doyle says, noting that among Al’s former students are captains for Jet Blue, American, Continental, and many other carriers.
Al had 14 declared emergencies in his more than 20,000 hours of flight time — yet he never crashed an airplane.
“I remember once in particular he had put an airplane down in a potato field,” says his daughter Frannie. “Reporters had called the house ... my mother had gotten shaken up, but then my father came home with a big smile on his face and he said, ‘Yeah, I made lots of mashed potatoes.’ Nothing was ever catastrophic with him.”
“His knowledge of airplanes was something incredible. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an airplane that he didn’t now what it was,” Doyle says. Al lost his medical in 1995 after quadruple- bypass surgery. He fought to get it back, then lost it again in 1997 when he had a pacemaker put in.
Not content to be grounded, Al discovered a loop-hole that allowed him to continue instructing as long as he was not PIC. While it ruled out primary instruction, hundreds of pilots received training and checkouts from Al after he lost his medical.
Al logged just four flights in the month before he died. On June 26, his last flight was giving a BFR to a pilot in a Grumman Tiger. A week later, Al passed away. Two weeks after that, his beloved wife Sandra died. “You want to encapsulate someone’s life in a paragraph, but I couldn’t even tell you half the stories he had,” Doyle says. “I always feel bad about when some one passes on like Al— the amount of knowledge that is lost, the number of stories that go with him. When somebody passes like Al, it’s a loss.”
He wasn’t a war hero or a famous test pilot. He was an instructor, a job often seen in aviation as simply a stepping stone to bigger and better things. It wasn’t for Al.
“A lot of people know what their passion in life is but they won’t pursue it,” Doyle says. “He took a chance, he knew what his passion was and he did it; he not only did it, he excelled at it.” Al and Sandy, thank you.
—Sean Fulton
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