Meet A City Employee: Airport Assistant Manager Ben Parson
Thursday, June 23rd, 2022
The City of Dalton is special because of the people who work hard every day to make it the best place to live, work, and play in Georgia. The City is proud of the men and women working to serve our residents. This article is part of a continuing series of profiles we'll be running from time to time to spotlight the special people who are making a difference in our City.
Ben Parson is the assistant manager of the Dalton Municipal Airport. He's worked there for nearly nine years, starting as a part-time employee and working his way up through the ranks. In addition to working full-time at the airport, Parson also flies approximately 30 hours per week as a part time job as a pilot for the Georgia Forestry Service. He says that most weeks he works seven days a week between the two jobs, and loves it.
Here's an interview with Parson about his work with the airport and his love of flying:
Ben, you actually started working here at the airport when you were in school, right?
Yes, I was homeschooled so I actually started while I was still in high school. And before that I was working at the Cleveland Regional Jetport in Cleveland, Tennessee the first year that it opened.
What’s your role here at the airport?
I’m the assistant airport manager now. I started as a lineman part-time and worked my way up through the ranks and I’m the assistant manager now. That’s what I do full-time and I also fly for the Georgia Forestry Service part-time. My main mission there is to fly around looking for forest fires mainly. We also have other missions like doing some disaster relief, we will ferry supplies to the coast if there’s a hurricane or tornado disaster areas, things of that nature, whatever the state wants us to do. Our main mission is to early detect and suppress wild fires.
Where did your interest in aviation come from?
My grandfather was pilot, my uncle was a pilot, my dad soloed so he was a student pilot but he never finished his private pilot’s license. So it has run in the family, but it really didn’t start until a guy I went to church with over in Eton took me for a ride in a small plane. I was so nervous, just trying to keep my nerves under control, I didn’t really want to go. But as soon as the tires left the ground and I saw everything shrinking around me and becoming smaller I just knew in that moment that was what I wanted to do the rest of my life. There was just no question. I was six years old at the time. From that point on I knew that was going to be the career for me.
Did you do your flight training here in Dalton? Where’d you learn to fly?
No, we didn’t have a flight school here in Dalton until recently. I think the last school that operated here closed down in the late 90’s or early 2000’s. During that time I was going through my training, it just wasn’t an option here. I started my initial training for my private in Cleveland, Tennessee when I was working up there. They gave me some discounts because I worked for the flight school. You’ve got different tiers of becoming a pilot, you’ve got what’s called a private pilot’s license where anyone can get their private and fly pretty much whatever they want to pretty much anywhere they want to, but you can’t fly for hire and you can’t fly in the clouds. So that was my first step. The second step, is getting an instrument certificate which means you can fly in the clouds, second step would be a commercial license. I did my instrument, my commercial single engine, commercial multi-engine all within the span of about a month and a half. I moved down to Florida to do that. Again, because there was no school here at the time. Now we do have a school here (the Cruise Flight Academy), it started about three months ago and it’s grown pretty rapidly here at Dalton. They’re up to two aircraft and the flight instructor is looking for more instructors to help him out because his schedule is filled because he’s flying every day, five or six students per day, from dusk til dawn, sometimes after twilight because you have to do certain night flying to get your license. So, he’s booked solid and he’s rolling pretty well.
Yes, the Cruise Flight Academy seems to be generating a lot of interest here for sure.
Yeah, we made one Facebook post about it a few days ago and it’s just absolutely blown up. I think part of it has to do with Top Gun coming out. Everyone has gotten back into the idea of, “flying would be pretty cool.” I think the general public really looks at flying and doesn’t look into it too much because they maybe think it’s out of reach. Because, it is fairly expensive but it’s not as unachievable as the average person might think. You can get a private pilot’s license for about $10,000. That number sounds big but you can spread that out over a number of years. So, it’s very attainable but I think that the general public just thinks – most people have an interest in it but they might not think it’s realistic.
Andrew Wiersma, the airport manager, he mentioned that there’s actually a shortage of pilots out there right now and that getting licensed can lead to jobs.
There’s tons of jobs. The pilot shortage has been looming for the better part of a decade but you’re only just now starting to see the results of it. It was going to start getting bad in 2020, but because Covid hit and everyone stopped flying it kind of prolonged it and brought about a different problem where you had too many pilots in the airlines and some airlines forced some of the older pilots who were about to retire into early retirement. Now that things have kind of opened back up, it’s just exaggerated the problem even more. Now you’re seeing, what was it two or three days ago that American Airlines stopped their service to three airports altogether, and that sort of thing is just going to keep happening. You’ll see it in Chattanooga eventually just because they can’t keep up – airlines have a deadline of 65 years old for mandatory retirement regardless of health, that’s when you have to retire. So the attrition rate is pretty high, you don’t have a lot of new pilots coming in because, again, most people think it’s unattainable. So you’ve got all these older guys who got their license back in the 60s and 70s and they’re coming up to the age where they have to retire and it’s really not sustainable. That’s good for me and for other pilots because there are a lot of opportunities and job security out there. And it’s not just the airlines who need pilots, but everywhere. At the Forestry Service, we’re needing pilots right now and also medical flights, private flights, all these smaller charter companies, more and more people are flying them because either they don’t want to fly airlines or because they just can’t find an airline flight because of all the cancellations because of the pilot shortage. So if there’s a job that requires flying at all, they probably are looking for pilots.
Take us through what a typical day is like for the assistant manager of the Dalton airport.
A typical day starts, I come in with the linemen and we go down and check our fuel. We check our fuel for water in the fuel every day – we are held to a very high standard for fuel quality. We check for water in the fuel, for debris in the fuel, every single day and every single tank. That’s first and foremost. And then we come into the FBO, that’s Fixed Base Operator, that’s what FBO stands for, it’s the terminal. We get the coffee going, make sure everything is clean. We check the flight radar for the day, see who’s coming in, who’s not. And then from there I’ll either start doing some administrative stuff or depending on what we’ve got coming in we might start preparing for flights. We typically see about ten to twelve corporate jets right now. We’re in a record year for traffic and for gallons of fuel sold. We’ve been really busy this year which is great. So that’s pretty much how the day starts. Through the day, I might go out and do some maintenance on the trucks, some cleaning, just making sure all of our required checks are done for anything airport relayed. Andrew, our airport manager, he might have me do something on the state side or the Georgia Airports Association side where he’s tied up, he’s pretty overburdened during the week with meetings, so he might ask me to do something administrative like that. And that’s pretty much how the day will go, it’s a hodgepodge of different stuff. I could either be scrubbing a toilet or I could be fueling a $60 million jet. And anything in between, could be mowing the grass… there’s really no typical day.
What’s the best part of the job, working here at the airport?
The best part of the job, the most rewarding part, is just knowing that you’re kind of the face of Dalton to those who come through this gateway. Being able to represent Dalton is really nice and that’s something that we don’t take lightly. We treat everybody, whether they come in a small two-seat Cessna 150 or whether they’re coming in a $75 million G-650, we’re going to treat them the same. We’re going to try to roll out the red carpet for them and try to make them feel welcome. That’s really rewarding, that’s the best part of the job for me.
What’s the coolest airplane that’s come through the airport here that you’ve seen?
Oh man there have been so many. A couple of weeks ago we had a B-17 come in. That was very cool. It was one of those things where we had the cheapest fuel in the area at that time. So, gas stations on the road, they kinda price their fuel different from us. We price our gas by the load we get, we get a load of aviation fuel probably once every month, month and a half. And that’s true with all airports. And prices have been going up so much, really steep increases, that we had an older load at the time that was about a month and a half old that was at a very cheap price and other airports around us had bought new gas more recently and had a much higher price that us, like a $1.50 over our price. And that B-17 took 780 gallons. The commemorative air force, who owns the Texas Raiders and that B-17 came in, they called the day before and asked for our fuel price. Which is typical, people call all the time and get the fuel price before they plan a trip. And sometimes they come in and sometimes they fly right by us, we never really know. And that was the case with this B-17, we didn’t know until one hour before they got here that they were coming. And even with that, like 30 people showed up to see it, just pulling off the road.
It’s pretty neat that many people were interested just on the spur of the moment.
You know, back in the 80s when the first Top Gun came out, there was a huge boom in aviation. Mostly in the military side, but also in the private side with people getting interest in it. And I think that we’re seeing that again with the new movie. Tons of people have seen it, we definitely have probably seen a 400 percent increase in questions and calls about the flight school, so it’s a really good time to have that and you know, it’s really nice where you can come rent these planes, you don’t have to have an instructor once you’ve got your private license. So you can come out to the Dalton airport, rent a 172, and be at the coast in two hours. Have lunch at the coast and fly back in two hours. It’s hard to beat that kind of flexibility. And I think we’re going to be seeing a lot of people starting to do that here. It’s an exciting time for us.
