William M. Davenport, longtime local pilot, remembered

By the time he was 12, Bill Davenport was hooked on flying.

"A friend of his father had a plane and he got to fooling around with that," said his wife, Eleanor Durham Davenport.

A Richmond native, he grew up in the small town of Gordonsville and learned to fly at its airport, where he worked to earn flight time. By the end of high school, he had enough experience to become a flight instructor.

Until the outbreak of World War II, he taught civil pilot training at the University of Virginia Flight School and later taught in Richmond. He was one of the youngest flight instructors in the country.

"All he ever wanted to do was fly an airplane. They said he never worked a day in his life. He did what he wanted to do," his wife said.

William Martin Davenport, inducted into the Virginia Aviation Hall of Fame in 1986, died of a burst aneurysm Monday at a Richmond-area hospital. A memorial service for the 91-year-old Richmond resident was held Wednesday at First Presbyterian Church in Richmond and a private burial was in Hollywood Cemetery.

After the Navy offered him a commission to become a Navy pilot, he earned his wings after only 23 hours of flight training at Pensacola Naval Air Station in Florida. He taught flying for several months before moving on to become a command pilot. He flew PBM Mariner patrol-bomber flying boats in the Pacific theater as well as huge PB2Y-3R Corondo flying boats that did 18-hour supply flights between San Francisco and Honolulu.

When the war ended, band leader Guy Lombardo invited Mr. Davenport to New York to help organize Long Island Airlines, a commuter line Lombardo was involved with that eventually had 40 scheduled flights per day. It operated from the East River area, near the Empire State Building, in the summer season. During the winter, it based its planes in Miami and flew around the Bahamas.

Mr. Davenport's passengers included luminaries such as actresses Marion Davies and Elizabeth Taylor.

When the Soviet Union cut off road and rail traffic to Allied-occupied West Berlin during the summer of 1948, the Navy called Mr. Davenport back to active duty to serve with the Berlin Airlift. He flew VIPs, such as the secretary of the Navy, while other pilots flew 270,000 missions that transported more than 2 million tons of supplies nonstop by air from June 24, 1948, to May 12, 1949, to prevent West Berliners from starving.

In 1950, he founded Davenport Airlines, a Richmond-based charter business that also did aerial-pipeline and power-line patrol.

For 36 years, he flew a red-and-white Piper Apache, Serial No. 14, that he bought in 1954. He first used it on a commuter route he developed between Richmond and Hampton Roads and then on other flying business. "I ran that thing from Maine to Florida, and not much further than the Mississippi, but I covered everything in between," he recalled in a 1990 Richmond Times-Dispatch interview.

Always coming up with new ideas, he sold his business in 1975 and founded Aviation Specialists Inc., a contract flying outfit that did everything from aerial photography to aerial advertising.

His businesses, places where young pilots could gain hours for their ratings, lent themselves to pilots with no experience. "He frequently was a pilot's first employer," said Philip Stubbs of Richmond, an American Airlines pilot who once worked for Mr. Davenport. "He was like a second father to me … (and to) kids (that he hired) in their early teens and 20s."

Family members said Mr. Davenport's greatest joy was hiring young men who wanted to fly for a living. He was proud of the pilots who had started with him and gone on to fly for major airlines.

In 1990, after about 5,000 flight hours and a million miles, Mr. Davenport flew his Apache out of Byrd Field one last time to become part of the collection of the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum.

"The last time I flew with him was about six months ago," Stubbs said. "He flew an airplane like he was 20 years old. He was always flawless, like it was second nature to him."

Survivors besides his wife, include a son, W. Martin Davenport Jr. of Richmond; a daughter, Victoria Angell Shivel of Henrico; four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.