Carving the love of flying
Air Force veteran carves his passion
Bill Alley said that when he joined the Air Force in 1945, he was a “wanna be.”
He wanted to be a pilot, but there wasn’t an opening in flight training for him so he worked in training and later in medical. When he was discharged two years later, he used his GI Bill education benefits to learn to fly.
He was part of a program that trained pilots who planned to join the Air Force, but by then he was already married and then he was a father, so he never went back into the service. Instead he used his flight training in the ministry.
Alley served 14 different churches around the Midwest, sometimes flying with his wife, Ramona, to assignments.
“The Lord said, ‘I’ll make a sky pilot out of you,’” he said, so he spent his career piloting souls as well as planes.
He was also a contractor and a developer and an architectural draftsman, drawing building plans by hand.
‘“I was a man of means by no means,” he said, quoting a song that was popular in the ’60s. He and Ramona had five children, who gave them 18 grandchildren and 19 great-grandchildren. They have been married 65 years.
Not long after obtaining his pilot license, Alley bought a 1943 Aeronca L-3 Army observation airplane and flew it for about two years before he sold it. In 1997, he bought the same plane again and restored it. He sold it a second time in 2003.
That was about the time he started making wooden models. Anyone can buy a plastic model kit, he said, but his models are wood and there’s no kit. He begins by drawing plans to scale, basing them on photographs. He draws at least four views from different perspectives.
He carves cedar to make his models. Much of the wood is scrap from his son’s construction business. He covers the cedar with a thin piece of plywood and then paints it.
It takes about a week of four- to six-hour days to create one of his smaller planes — and he’s made dozens. When they moved to Bella Vista from Wichita five years ago, Alley thinks he left 25 to 30 planes behind. Some he sold, some he gave away. A tavern in Wichita used his planes to decorate, he said.
In Bella Vista, he has planes hanging in his garage, his back porch and his office. Under the back deck, he has models of two tri-wings from World War I. He can easily name each model and explain the craft’s uses.
At 88 years old, Alley considers himself fully retired, although he will still preach if a Southern Baptist congregation needs a substitute. And he occasionally writes a Bible commentary. He took a break from the planes to build each of his children a bird house. Really, it’s a bird condominium, Ramona explained, pointing out a two-story structure next to a very large plane.
Someday, Alley would like to see his aircraft find a home in a museum. But, for now, he’s happy creating them in the garage from his hand-drawn plans.