‘$5-Frank’ Still Flying High at 72 With His White-Knuckle Rides

The little airplane roared up the homemade runway, confident, bouncing uphill and keeping a little to the right to stay on the narrow pavement. Then, quickly, up, up, up over the New River Gorge.

Way down to the right is the majestic, steel-arch New River Gorge Bridge. For a better look, the pilot banks the plane hard, hard right. Whoa, there it is, straight down.

The pilot is as picturesque as the view.

He is Frank Thomas, known in these parts as Five-Dollar Frank. That’s the price of his 15-minute knuckle-numbing ride. He gives you his mountain philosophy about God, government and everything in between for free.

Hang on.

“There’s no better ride at this price anywhere in the world,” Thomas says. “I want to share this beautiful, magnificent wonderland with as many people as I can. I hate to go home in the evening and I go back out as soon as I can.”

Thomas is 72. He’s been flying, with youthful enthusiasm, for nearly 53 years.

“I’m 16 years old when it comes to flying and beauty,” he says.

He is up at dawn, thrilling sightseers until the sun sinks below the mountains. He has left himself no time for a family. His marriage is to the blue sky and the green West Virginia landscape beneath it.

Thomas’ father died when he was 3. When he was old enough to get a job as a theater usher he used some of his earnings for flying lessons, but didn’t tell his mother, who disapproved. Soon he was flying sick people to hospitals and doing other charter work throughout the Appalachians.

When he was 23, back in 1944, he cleared a gentle hillside about 37 miles southeast of Charleston--cleared it himself with ax and saw. The result is Fayette Airport, home of his Poor Men’s Flying School where he has taught more than 1,000 students to fly.

One was Roy Swanigan, a poor man sure enough. Swanigan, a year older than Thomas, lost both legs in a coal mine accident in 1946 and had a wife and two children to support. Frank gave him a job at the airport and also taught him to fly. In 1954, Swanigan became, he says, America’s first double amputee with a pilot’s license.

“Frank is a very peculiar person in a lot of ways,” Swanigan says, “but he has a heart of gold.”

If you’re thinking of flying to the Fayette Airport, by the way, a state guide for pilots advises that if you want runway lights you should phone ahead “or circle the field.”

A rusted metal stand props open the door to the airport office. A note stuck on the stand says: “Back in 15 minutes. Will fly.” A German shepherd dog, Runway, sleeps under a table. The room is crammed with trinkets, papers, books. One is Thomas’ own collection of anecdotes and poems: “It Is This Way With Men Who Fly.”

Frank’s sense of humor does, as Swanigan says, run to the peculiar. For instance, he keeps a dummy electric chair (a colander serves for a cap) in one airport hangar. A storage shed stands nearby with large footprints trailing up the side. Outside his office stands a homemade guillotine with red paint splashed on it. Frank credits Disney World for inspiration.

“Sure, you can go to Disney or you can go to MGM, but who thinks of just offering a tour of this area?” says Roger Mayo, 27, a geography student at Michigan State University. Mayo works summers as a guide for white-water rafting tours on nearby rivers. He says he sends tourists who are looking for other Appalachian attractions to take a ride with Thomas.

“He’s an attraction in himself,” Mayo says.

Actually, Five-Dollar Frank charges only half that price for children. He is convincing when he says his interest is in nature’s riches, not man’s. “What would I do with money?,” he asks.

“He’s got such a joy for flying,” says Becky Chisum. “He likes to share it with people. I really believe that.”

Chisum, 32, helps run an aircraft maintenance and inspection business at the airport and helps take care of Thomas’ fleet of planes.

The fleet numbers three. A second pilot helps out on weekends. A line of customers usually snakes along the chain-link fence that surrounds the lone runway, which, with its bumps and cracks, looks much like a 2,145-foot driveway that needs some work.

Similar carefree wear shows on Thomas. He requires two hearing aids to hear riders’ squeals and cries above the airplane’s engine. The airplane, a Cessna 172, likewise shows hard use. Its seat cushions are held together with duct tape.

But the view never gets old.