Transcript

[00:04] AL HIGDON: My name is Al Higdon. I am 86 years old. It is now March 9 of 2023. We’re speaking in Wichita, Kansas. I’m alongside Paul Bowen, who is critically acknowledged as the world’s greatest aviation photographer. And my relationship to him is. I’m his biggest fan of.

[00:30] PAUL BOWEN: Well, I am Paul Bowen, and as of the 9 March 2023, I’m 75. As we’re speaking from the air capital of the world, Wichita, Kansas. And I’m sitting across from my longtime friend and one of my heroes, Al Higdon, who I’ve worked with over the years as I’m a commercial photographer specializing in aviation photography. And he was so responsible for Learjet becoming an international buzzword for business aviation. And we worked together through his advertising agency. We have a lot of fun memories, some of which we can share. We have actually traveled to Europe together and done photo shoots, but primarily working here in Wichita, which has made more airplanes, has actually built more airplanes than any other city in the world, thereby claiming the title of the air capital of the world. We’ve had some great experiences over the years associated with aviation.

[01:47] AL HIGDON: I would just mention that I started in the business aviation industry in 1961, which I consider to be the dawn of mature business aviation. There were no jets at that time. Everything had propellers on them. I worked at then Beech Aircraft, now a part of Textron. I was able to be there when the Beach King Air was introduced, is still in production all these many decades later. In 1964, I made the move over to Learjet, which had been in business for not quite a year at that point in Wichita. I joined in September of 1964, which was about a month after the airplane was certificated and about a month before the first customer delivery. So I’ve been able to be on the doorstep of two major introductions, monumental aircraft models in the last half century.

[02:57] PAUL BOWEN: Yeah, pretty impressive. And I would say that there are two people who are responsible historically for Learjet being the name that it is. Of course, bill learned and Al Higdon You know, Al did so many fascinating marketing and PR involvements with Learjet that to this day make it the coke of business aviation.

[03:33] AL HIGDON: Well, thanks, Paul, but I would have to strongly mention the name of Jim Greenwood, another friend of Paul’s, who was my boss at Learjet and with whom I worked both at Beech and Learjet for many years. We were given the charge by Bill Lear in the early days of the Learjet company to make the name Learjet synonymous with the term business jet. And that was our mission. So we did that by lots of avenues by getting their jets into movies, into television shows, into other people’s print advertising, from luggage to cigarettes. And we were hoping that when somebody saw a small jet in the air, they would say, there goes a Learjet, whether it was or not, because Learjet was the smallest company vying in those early years to get a share of the business jet market. So we did well, some of the movies included in, like Flint with James Colburn, Ice station ZeBRa with Rock Hudson, they’ve kind of slipped my mind now. There were half a dozen of them, but it sort of went like rolling thunder once it got started. Other people wanted to have a piece of that pie. So we then became sort of the facilitator to provide an airplane at their request.

[05:07] PAUL BOWEN: You know, business aircraft are basically time machines. And when people started recognizing how they could improve on their productivity through the use of an airplane, taking it from a small airport to another small airport, getting them closer to their destination, it became pretty obvious that it was an amazing tool. Beyond just the opinion that it was only for jet setters and all, it really proved that it was a great tool. Although you did have celebrities, Frank Sinatra and so many people that Al worked with back in those days, who, again, recognize the importance. And, you know, they’re obviously, it was pretty fun if you pulled up in your learjet and you got some attention. But a lot of fascinating early stories that I know Al could. Sure.

[06:06] AL HIGDON: Yeah. Paul raises a very good point that in the early two or three years of the business jet, it was more a matter of showbiz and the pizzazz factor. But we quickly learned that that had a limited audience and limited appeal from a marketing standpoint. So we had to kind of switch the conversation from the well known jet setters into the well known historical corporations who saw the advantage of flying a business jet in their company operations. That was a little less dramatic and exciting, but nonetheless, that was the bread and butter of the industry from that point forward.

[06:51] PAUL BOWEN: Yeah, well, and it’s fascinating if you think about it. You know, it’s kind of the difference between traveling in your own private car versus getting on a bus. And so you don’t have to worry about who might be overhearing some of your business decisions that you’re talking about, or even personal things when you’re traveling. You leave when you want. You leave from where you want, you take what you want. You don’t have to worry about your luggage not making it. And you become very effective in using the limited hours of the day.

[07:24] AL HIGDON: America went through a siege of hijackings in the late sixties and early seventies, which indirectly and maybe even directly, was a great stimulus for the sale of business jet aircraft because of the security that they brought, as opposed to getting on a public airliner that may or may not make it to its destination. So that was another aspect that sort of helped. Nobody wanted that to happen, but it did and helped spur the industry.

[07:56] PAUL BOWEN: Well, and thinking of more current news worthy events with COVID to be able to hop onto a plane and know who’s there on the airplane with you and what their medical condition might be became another factor for encouraging people to consider either owning or chartering or becoming a partial owner in a fractional ownership program, with the business aircraft sort of.

[08:29] AL HIGDON: Backing up just a little bit. Again, I know this an historical document. In the early days, Bill and Moya Lear, his wife, were pretty well known in Hollywood. They used to live in Los Angeles. They came to Wichita to build the airplane. So as a result of that, there were almost a steady stream of well known people who would come into Wichita to see the Lears and to touch the airplane. The people were beginning to talk about all the way from Fred Waring, the bandleader, to George Peppard, to Frank Sinatra, as Paul mentioned, gee, who else?

[09:15] PAUL BOWEN: John Denver.

[09:16] AL HIGDON: And John Denver owned an airplane and a Learjet and was a good spokesman for the airplane indirectly. But there were just dozens of people who came in, not just from show business, but from. From sports. Arnold Palmer owned a Learjet and flew it. Then he flew assess a citation for many years. Rocky MaRciano, the boxer, came by, let’s see, Mickey Mantle was here, baseball player again, the airplane attracted people to come and see it because it was so new and so revolutionary.

[09:55] PAUL BOWEN: And although it was not what we would consider a large airplane, it was fast. And as a photographer, I can say it was a cool looking airplane. So it looked fast just sitting on the ramp. It just had the early models had this really beautiful kind of pointed nose, sleek, pointed nose. It had twin engines that were back on toward the tail of the fuselage and what we would call a t tail or a tail that’s called the horizontal stabilizer. But you think of it as like a small wing up on the top of the tail, and that with that up above, rather than on some airplanes where the tails are down lower, the up above gives a really sleek, cool up. But then they had, proportionally, they had what most people walking up the airplane would think they’re torpedoes on the wingtips, but they were tip tanks that held fuel. And so you’ve got this sleek nose, this sleek fuselage, this cool looking tail, the engines in the back, so it’s nice. Again, sweeping, sleek lines, and then these cool tip tanks that were hanging out on the end of the early models. My first major photo, air to air, where you’re shooting from one airplane to another. First major session was out in California through Al and his team shooting the model Lear 23. There were primarily, and Al can go into this better than I can. Early series were the Model 20 series airplanes of the Learjet, and then followed by the 35s or thirties, excuse me, 24 and 24 and 25. So I had so much fun shooting them. So my primary business was, and still is, to photograph business jets primarily in the air, although I’ll shoot interiors and ground shots, too, as needed. But the most fun, and where I’ve built my reputation, has been shooting an aerial ballet from one airplane to another as I direct them through headsets and communication between airplanes, as we look for beautiful backgrounds, beautiful lighting, and beautiful angles on the airplanes, trying to convey the love of these gorgeous flying sculptures, as I like to call them. I mean, who doesn’t love pictures of cool airplanes? So I’m one of those really lucky guys. So as a child, especially back, oh, let’s say, in the fifties, forties, fifties, it was not uncommon for especially young boys to be building models of airplanes. I happen to not be one of those guys. But my father worked for Douglas aircraft. I was raised in southern California, and he worked for Douglas, which became McDonnell Douglas years later. And I can remember living in studio City, southern California, and my dad bringing home a litho or a poster of an A 4D Skyhawk that Douglas had made, and he had worked on that airplane. And I can. I don’t know how old I was, you know, six, eight years old, maybe. And I can remember actually looking at that and thinking to myself, but never asking him, how did they get that picture? And little did I know, decades later, that would be how I’d make my living. And so for me, that was my first real encounter with aviation.

[14:13] AL HIGDON: Well, my entree is much less dramatic than falls. As he mentioned, Wichita is the air capital of the world. Aviation manufacturing, for decades has dominated the, the business and industry landscape of Wichita. And when I graduated from college, my first job was with beach aircraft. As I had mentioned, I went to beach just because it was a good company. I liked what they did, and it gave me an entree into aviation, which I ended up loving. But I didn’t really realize at the time that it would grow on me as it did. I spent the next 40 years of my life directly and indirectly involved with aviation.

[15:00] PAUL BOWEN: And I moved to Wichita in the early seventies, actually, to direct a halfway house crash pad through a church here in town after achieving my degree in zoology from UC Santa Barbara and fell in love with Wichita, with the attitude of the people. You know, Wichita is a city of about 400,000 people, so it’s nice size, but it’s not uncommon to know someone when you go out to dinner or lunch. And so I ended up getting a job assisting a photographer for $1.75 an hour back in the early seventies, after my stint with the halfway house, and again fell in love with Wichita. And at that point, there were so many aircraft being manufactured here that if you had a camera and could focus it, you’d probably at some point take a picture of an airplane. And so with Beech, Learjet and Cessna here, I had a plenty of targets as a commercial photographer to shoot pizzas with pizza hut one week and then a Learjet the next week. So that’s how I got involved with doing the marketing and advertising photography for the manufacturers.

[16:26] AL HIGDON: You know, I’ll bet not one out of a thousand, maybe not one out of a million people. Paul, have any idea how you go about arranging and staging a photo shoot? You don’t just get in a couple airplanes and start flying. There’s safety involved. There’s relationship of airplane to airplane. There’s scenic considerations, sun, lightness, dark. That would be interesting to people, I think, to kind of go through a photo mission.

[16:54] PAUL BOWEN: So there are a lot of people involved in it. As you can imagine, that goes way beyond the pilots and the photographers. And the planning takes place very often months in advance. We try to consider what backgrounds we’d like with the airplanes and what message we’re trying to convey, you know, whether it be a high altitude airplane or one that crosses the ocean or a higher performance airplane or whatever it might be. And then working with the marketing and advertising teams, try and determine how we can best convey those qualities that we’re hoping to convey visually in a still photograph. I don’t normally do video. I do some video, but mostly still photography. And so part of the trick is, how do you make a still shot of an airplane look like it’s actually flying and going fast or whatever you want to try and convey? So we’ll meet, and once we’ve determined when the shoot’s going to happen, we will have discussed the things I just talked about, and then we have a briefing. It’s usually a two part briefing. The briefing begins with, normally my stating what we hope to achieve artistically, as determined prior. And then the second half of the briefing is really run by the pilots who are going to say, okay, here’s how we can achieve that safely. So, you know, it’s inherently a very dangerous situation. You have two airplanes that are flying close together, often with pilots who’ve not spent much time flying close together. And most of these pilots have spent their careers trying to stay away from other airplanes in the air rather than coming up to them. So if I’m in the lead airplane, let’s say, and I’m looking back at the airplane or alongside the airplane that I’m shooting, then we have the responsibility as the lead airplane of flying smoothly and not running into anything out there that would ruin our day, be it another airplane, a tower, the ground, whatever. And the responsibility of the airplane that is flying on us is in a simplistic way to keep from hitting us and following the directions that I relay to them as to where we want them into relation to our plane. So it’s, as I mentioned earlier, it’s kind of an aerial ballet where we’re safely attempting to come back down and share these great pictures of these beautiful machines once we’ve landed safely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I kiddingly say I’ve had a. I’ve lost engines on single engine airplanes and on twin airplanes. We’ve had a number of near mid air collisions, but I’ve only crashed once, and that was on takeoff. We had a little issue, but I’m.

[20:25] AL HIGDON: Here to talk about it back on the historical aspect of this. Why Wichita? Why aviation? In the 1920s, oil was discovered in Kansas. Some people got pretty rich as a result of that. They met up with former World War one pilots who loved to fly but had no money. So the two really got together in the. And at one point in Wichita, there were more than a dozen aircraft manufacturing companies. In 1928 or 2090, they adopted the name air capital of the world, which is stuck. That continued through the thirties. The war years of the forties were a boom year. The aircraft companies were working really around the clock, 24 hours a day, to put out airplanes for the military, specifically, Boeing primarily, but also Beech and Cessna were doing the same. After World War two, the industry hit pretty much of a lull because the demand hadn’t picked up yet for commercial aviation. But they survived. In the fifties, brought good progress with propeller driven airplanes. And then in about 1960, a national survey was done of corporations to see their potential interest in business jet as a form of transportation. That survey brought back the answer that maybe, maybe for all time, all manufacturers could ultimately collectively build 300 business jets. That was seen as the market. Bill Lear, who was working out in California at the time with his own company, but it was an aviation guy, said, we can do better than that. So he discovered through his son, who was living in Switzerland, a swiss fighter bomber, the P 16. That looked like a pretty good platform for ultimately a business jet airplane. So he went over to Switzerland to try to get that started and found the Swiss were great people, but lousy workers, and they just didn’t want to devote the time needed. So he started casting about where to build this airplane. He now took onto his own. And he looked at a number of sites in the US and he said later that if I was going to build cars, I’d go to Detroit. I’m building airplanes, I’m coming to Wichita. That’s where the experienced engineers are, the manufacturing people. And he sort of bullied the industry into thinking about jetse. And within a few years, there were others that came on board and from North American to Lockheed were building a small jets, so to speak. So it’s been a fascinating industry to have been a part of, as Paul and I have both been in on it pretty much early on and have watched it grow from that point on.

[23:30] PAUL BOWEN: Well, and Al also has contributed heavily to the three primary general aviation manufacturers, Beechcraft, as he mentioned, Learjet and then Cessna, which is now part of the Textron aviation group. And when Al took over and his advertising agency took over the responsibilities of marketing the Cessna citation Jethe group, they just, I hate to say took off. But that’s, that’s what happened. And all of the expertise and experience that his team had had with Learjet carried over to the citation group. And Al, I can’t remember, but citations sold more business jets than any other brand or.

[24:27] AL HIGDON: Yeah, I think there’s seven or 8000 airplanes. I think out now Learjet’s about 3000. There really isn’t a strong number three out there. They sort of have dominated the industry. But Learjet production ceased last year. The Learjet company continues, but no more new airplanes are being built. Cessna continues to go very, very strong under great leadership and really good product line, and they’ll be the leader for the smaller and mid sized jets for years to come, I think.

[25:02] PAUL BOWEN: Yeah, agreed. Well, and it’s interesting, you know, Cessna, I’ll bet if you ask most pilots who are active today how they learned to fly or what kind of equipment they learned to fly in. Certainly a great majority would have been in the smaller Cessna aircraft. And so Cessna was smart over the years to make the cockpits and all pretty user friendly. And as you stepped up from one model of Cessna product into the next, it was a pretty easy transition. So when Cessna came along with the citation jet line, it wasn’t such a scary or difficult transition for someone who’d been flying a prop airplane to move into the citation line.

[26:02] AL HIGDON: Cessna, for several years, lagged behind the building of a jet airplane in a product mixed. And when they finally did embark on the Citation jet series, their initial airplanes were extremely reliable and proficient, but very slow. They were 400 miles an hour jets. And at Learjet, where I was at the time, we worried. We talked about be worried about having a bird strike from the rear, which is obviously not going to happen, but it was something that was going on. But once Cessna got their feet on the ground and their gravity going, they just took over. They’re smart marketers. They were the first company, I think, Paul, to ask the customer what they wanted.

[27:00] PAUL BOWEN: Good point.

[27:01] AL HIGDON: When I worked at beach and early on, the engineering department largely came up with the models and turned it over to the salespeople to sell. But under Russ Meyer and his team at Cessna, they really started asking grassroots questions about what’s important to you, what do you need, what’s less concerning of you? And then they would build airplanes around that series of responses that they got. Very smart, very fundamental, but darn smart.

[27:31] PAUL BOWEN: Yeah, very smart. Well, and interestingly, thinking about the slotation, as the citation was called, the early ones and so forth, and the bird strikes and all, the irony of that is that over the decades, then citation came out with a model called the citation ten, which became the fastest civil aircraft built at the time. And I think it was 92 mach. And so they really flip flopped that whole perception.

[28:07] AL HIGDON: Yeah, it didn’t hurt them in marketing that airplane. The first airplane went to a guy named Arnold Palmer, and he had somewhat of a name recognition and good personal friend of Russ Myers as well. I got to work with Arnold Palmer in 1976, when was the bicentennial year for America, and there was a major aviation gathering in Denver with the Aviation and Space Riders association, and we came up with the idea of setting a around the world speed record in a learjet in 1976 with Arnold Palmer was the command pilot, plus three others, including an aviation official observer. And the guy was not just a great golfer and a great pilot, but a superhuman being. And he just. Paul’s met him, I’m sure yeah.

[29:01] PAUL BOWEN: I had a chance to work with Arnold Palmer a handful of times, and I have some great stories of what.

[29:07] AL HIGDON: A great gentleman filmed him down in Florida.

[29:10] PAUL BOWEN: We did. We did. And Al’s team at Sullivan Higgins sink advertising agency came up with a fabulous print ad that when Palmer was receiving his citation seven, I went down to Orlando and photographed him in the citation. And I may misquote this, but be close enough that the headline was Arnold Palmer’s new seven iron, which was great. And what a great guy. Seriously.

[29:57] AL HIGDON: Take it, Paul.

[29:58] PAUL BOWEN: You know, I mentioned earlier that it takes quite a team to get these photo shoots safely and successfully accomplished. And over the years, I’ve got. I’ve been credited with over a thousand magazine covers, but that was maybe 20 years ago when I stopped counting. So I appreciate that. And I’ve been involved, obviously, in multitudes of marketing and advertising campaigns for the manufacturers. But I can’t emphasize enough that it’s a team effort and that the real heroes of the photo shoots are the pilots. I may have the idea, as a director, an aerial director, of how I want to portray the image with the background, the lighting, the angles, the time of day, the lens that I’m using and all. But if the pilots can’t respond to my direction and put the airplane exactly where I need it, when I need it, as we’re going along at 200 miles an hour, then I’ll never get the shot. So I’ve always said, and I hold this true to this day, that the pilots are the heroes of any photoshoot.

[31:20] AL HIGDON: One thing Paul may not mention, as his legacy continues, as he is on his way out, as I’m on my way out. Paul’s daughter, Ashley, is CEO of an advertising agency here in Wichita, which specializes in aviation client work. And she also is the current president of the Wichita Aero Club, which is the dominant organization here in town that brings aviation people together once a month or so to hear a presentation to talk about aviation things. So the Bowen Cook name will go on after we’re out of here.

[31:58] PAUL BOWEN: So that’s Ashley Bowen Cook at 1800? Yeah. Yeah. She’s pretty special. Sure. It’s interesting. I actually get asked frequently what my favorite shots are, and I, you know, it’s, again, you know, who’s your favorite child?

[32:27] AL HIGDON: So I’m going to guess after you start.

[32:31] PAUL BOWEN: But one that I think that Al’s thinking about has to do with what we call the vortices effect that comes off of the wings of any airplane. So as an airplane is flying the air, and I don’t know, all the technical stuff, but as a photographer, the air is moving from the fuselage out to the wingtips on both sides and then swirls into circular patterns. It happens all the time, but it’s only revealed when there’s a weather phenomenon like a marine layer off the California coast or clouds or smoke or something like that, but it’s happening all the time. And I was fortunate enough to kind of discover this visually a number of years ago on a learjet shoot out off the California coast. And it’s a wingtip. Vortices would be kind of officially what it’s called. And it is so cool. And I know that I can create it, I know the conditions it takes to create it, but I can’t control it. So I’m a bit of an external observer watching this phenomenon happen. And there’s so many times I want to just put the camera down and sit back and enjoy it, but at least I can capture it and share it with other friends.

[33:54] AL HIGDON: You know, I can’t help but thinking as people are listening to this, they are assuming you’re sitting in one business jet look, shooting out the window of another business jet, and that’s not the way it happens at all.

[34:04] PAUL BOWEN: Yeah, good point. Thanks, Al. So my favorite platform to shoot from is a World War two B 25 bomber. And it’s a twin engine high wing bomber that in the tail position, which is my favorite position to shoot from, where the tail gunner used to shoot with a 50 caliber machine gun. And now we can remove the tail cone and have an open air area that the target airplane can pull up behind at our 06:00 position. So I’m up there going 200 miles an hour, windy, cold, vibrating like mad and having the best seat in the house.

[34:49] AL HIGDON: Dress to the teeth.

[34:50] PAUL BOWEN: I am. It’s like we have to dress like we’re going snow skiing because it gets colder about three degrees every thousand feet that you go up. So if you start out at sunrise and it’s 50 degrees in LA and you go up 10,000ft, all of a sudden it’s pretty cold.

[35:08] AL HIGDON: I don’t think it’s a false rumor that you once landed and discovered you had not fastened your seat belt.

[35:14] PAUL BOWEN: Yeah, yeah, we don’t tell my wife about that one. Well, what had happened was it actually came, came undone during the. And it was a special harness, military type harness. And apparently one of my cameras that you can imagine, I’m strapped in, well, theoretically, and my cameras are strapped in pretty well. And so unfortunately, one of my camera straps apparently hooked around, and I didn’t realize that until I looked down. And that was mentally challenging.

[35:52] AL HIGDON: Well, all in all, I think we consider ourselves two guys darn lucky to be doing what we did for so long. And Paul is still active. I’m not. But we were there at a good time. We rode through the really successful years of business aviation, and I think we consider ourselves very fortunate individuals to be where we were when we landed.

[36:17] PAUL BOWEN: Amen. Yeah. Yeah. Truly, it’s still fun to see the manufacturers doing so well. And the fact that we’ve stepped beyond the novelty of business aircraft and recognizing that they are great tools can be used again, just like a car versus a bus. And there are times where I’ll go out on these chutes still and come back, and at the end I’ll say, and I get paid to do this, too. And then the one thing I’d love to share, too, is that Al and I have had a chance to meet, become friends with real heroes who are associated with aviation. I don’t know how many astronauts I’ve become friends with. And World War two heroes who we’ve, you know, we’ve become so close through aviation and appreciate what they’ve done to secure our freedoms over the years.

[37:23] AL HIGDON: That’s a very good point. Yeah, some of the real greatest generation people who are still around, and to get to know them a little bit and be a part of their lives has been pretty fascinating.

[37:37] PAUL BOWEN: Truly.

[37:45] AL HIGDON: Well, I think we probably covered it, but just to have been here at the dawn of the, the beach, King Air, which is still in production after 1012 thousand airplanes have been built to have been in on the ground floor of the Learjet, which is so synonymous with the term business jet. And to watch that go. And as Paul was nice enough to point out, to have been with Cessna aircraft for 20 years during their dominant leadership in the industry, how lucky can a guy get?

[38:18] PAUL BOWEN: I can’t echo it any better. Al, always a pleasure, my friend. I’ve looked up to you for a long, long time. It’s the benefit way beyond what we’ve been able to achieve has been the friendships that have come out of our lucky time in aviation.

[38:50] AL HIGDON: Absolutely, my friend. It’s always been a pleasure to work with the best, and you have been right at the top of the best, and I appreciate all your work and you personally.

[38:58] PAUL BOWEN: Thanks for being my agent.

[38:59] AL HIGDON: Yeah.