H. Combs, 90; Pioneer in Aviation, Learjet Executive
Harry Combs, a former president of Gates Learjet and founder of AMR Combs, a national chain of corporate aircraft service centers, has died. He was 90.
According to Frey Funeral Home in Wickenburg, Ariz., Combs died Tuesday at a hospice in Phoenix, apparently of heart failure.
Combs was honored last week in North Carolina as one of aviation’s top 100 leaders in ceremonies marking the centennial of the Wright Brothers first flight.
In November, Combs gave the National Park Service a full-scale reproduction of the 1903 Wright Flyer, valued at $1 million. It will be displayed at the Wright Brothers National Memorial at Kill Devil Hills, N.C.
“He was a very dynamic individual -- a perfectionist, really, in everything he did,” said close friend Jim Greenwood, a former Wichita, Kan., aviation public relations executive. “He was a real aviation pioneer.”
Combs, born in Denver on Jan. 27, 1913, had watched his father train to fly combat planes in World War I.
His father, shot down twice during the war as a pilot for the Royal Canadian Air Force, had warned him never to set foot in a plane. But after Charles Lindbergh’s historic crossing of the Atlantic in 1927, the son took up flying. In 1929, at the age of 16, he built and flight-tested a sport biplane named “Vamp Bat.”
Combs graduated from Yale University, and after flying for two years with Pan American Airways, he founded Mountain States Aviation, an airport operation business and flight school that later became Combs Aircraft.
The business trained more than 9,000 pilots to fly freight planes and fighters, gliders and bombers during World War II. Combs joined the Army Air Corps and flew troop transports over the North Atlantic, Africa and India.
From 1971 to 1982, he was president of Gates Learjet. He moved the company to Tucson in 1975, believing it played second to Wichita’s larger light plane manufacturers, Cessna Aircraft Co. and Beech Aircraft Corp. The brand is now owned by Bombardier Aerospace.
Combs is survived by his wife, Ginney; two sons, Terry and Tony, both of Denver; and a daughter Clara Moore of Montrose, Colo.
