Fly Guy

Fly Guy

Four decades of running a company that flies small planes across the world has taught Steve Hall one valuable business lesson: Nothing beats being prepared.

entrepreneurs by Mark Gordon | Managing Editor

Steve Hall has a built up a nice-sized library of swashbuckling stories about near-death, hangnail survival and all-around carousing over the past 40 years.

That's bound to happen when you run a business that deliverers small airplanes to dealers and private customers worldwide, all from a 35-acre grass airstrip in rural Hillsborough County that has cows for neighbors.

But out of hundreds of war stories, one from 1977 stands out, as it was literally a war story. That was when Hall, with his four-month pregnant wife Joy riding shotgun, landed a Beechcraft King C-90 airplane on a dirt road in Rhodesia, a war-torn African nation that's since been renamed Zimbabwe.

Upon stepping out of the plane, the Halls were told the only way to get from the airport to the main village was by riding armed in an armed convoy.

So the escort handed Steve Hall an Uzi and placed a 9mm Beretta pistol in Joy Hall's hand. The escort said if the convoy got ambushed by rebel fighters - a real possibility, apparently - that the Halls should just wave the guns in the air, maybe squeeze off a few rounds and yell and holler a lot.

REVIEW SUMMARY

Businesses. Wings of Eagles, Wimauma, Hillsborough County.

Industry. Aircraft delivery

Key. Company has survived in an ultra niche industry through devotion to safety and preparation.

Neither Steve or Joy Hall fired a shot that day, but it also did not dissuade them from a dream business.

Steve Hall sells a unique service, both on the Gulf Coast and nationwide. His company, Wings of Eagles, transports planes overseas, anything from a $250,000 Cessna 172 to a Boeing 737 that's worth tens of millions of dollars.

He's been running the business for 41 years, the last 25 or so in the Bay area. He has taken 709 flights himself and the other 4,500 trips have been farmed out to a stable of contract pilots Hall personally trains.

Wings of Eagles has delivered planes to more than 100 countries, from Europe to dozens of African nations to East Asia and the Middle East. It even recently ferried a few Cessna Caravans to Kirkuk, Iraq, a fighting zone about 150 miles north of Baghdad. Those planes, delivered through a contract with the U.S. Defense Dept., are for American Special Forces troops, says Hall.

The company is purely an airplane ferry business; it doesn't buy or sell any planes. "We stay as far away from sales as we can," says Hall, 63. "We just deliver."

Cheap dollars

There's a small community of trip-for-hire ferry pilots scattered across the country, but few people have turned it into a business like Hall has. He didn't even know a business like this existed when the Kansas native gradated from Wichita State in 1968.

The only thing Hall knew for sure was that he wanted to put his 5,000 hours of logged flight-time to good use by combining flying with a entrepreneurial free-spirit kind of job. He had been a licensed pilot since he turned 16 years old and earned his commercial pilot's license by the time he turned 18.

When he heard about a local aircraft ferry business, he was hooked. Problem was, the owner didn't have any openings. Undeterred, Hall says he hung around the hangar and runways for a month. When a pilot died in a crash, Hall got the job. Says Hall: "I was a warm body at the right spot at the right time."

Hall started his own company a short time later. In the 1980s, he moved to Tampa, to be near some relatives. He later set up shop at the Wimauma Airport, about 40 miles southwest of the Tampa International Airport.

Wings of Eagles has gone through countless growth periods and slumps over its four decades, a direct consequence of being directly tied to global exchange rates. "The air delivery business will follow the exchange rate every time," Hall says. "When the dollar is cheap [overseas] they come here. When it's cheap here, they go over there."

The schizophrenic U.S. dollar of 2008 has caused Hall's financial projections to have similar schizophrenic gyrations. In August, with the U.S. dollar's value hammered down, it looked like Hall was going to have his best year in three decades, ferrying more than 200 planes for revenues surpassing $3 million. Foreign customers were looking to capitalize on the cheapened dollar by buying American.

But as the American dollar began its turnaround, orders coming in to Wings of Eagles dropped from 25 or 30 in June and July to less than 10 a month in September and October. In total, the value of the American dollar has risen 30% against the euro since the spring.

As a result of the fluctuations, Hall is projecting 2008 revenues will barely hit $2 million and could be closer to $1.5 million. "We'll be way off," says Hall. "We're just trying to keep our shorts on."

The drop puts Hall in a precarious spot. For the first time in a long time, he's thinking about how he can grow the business. "My biggest downfall is that I'm more an operations guy than I am a business builder," says Hall. "Now I'm trying to stay in the office more and drum up business."

Special breed

Up until now, Hall has spent most of his business-building capital on pilot training. He considers training to be paramount to running a sustainable airplane ferry business, as the risks are high and every flight is different than the one before.

Every Wings of Eagles pilot is aware of the dangers: Since 1967, five of Hall's pilots have died in crashes during a delivery trip. Dozens more have made emergency landings, including several that have ended up in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, waiting to be rescued. (Hall vividly recalls one pilot, who upon being recued by a ship, swam back to his sinking plane to retrieve a few thousand dollars. That pilot got a stern lecture from Hall upon his safe return.)

Hall looks for pilots that have some flying experience but not a lot, as he doesn't want his people, who work on a per-flight contract basis, to be brainwashed by the highly regulated commercial airline industry. Hall spends about $20,000 to train a pilot the Wings of Eagles way and then spends several thousand dollars per pilot for safety gear.

"What we look for," Hall says, "are unsuccessful Kamikaze pilots."

He's joking. Sort of. While the 13 current Wings of Eagles pilots aren't certifiably crazy, many of them do have a "screw loose," says Hall. One pilot, Mike Tidwell, is a former juvenile detention officer-turned successful pool company owner in Tampa.

Tidwell met Hall about five years ago and started flying for him last year. He's gone on a dozen or so trips, leaving his wife and his dad to run Ruskin-based Tidwell Pool Service. He's taken planes to Spain and France, along with a few deliveries to the Middle East. His favorite spot among the dozens of refueling stations he's landed in is Jersey, a tiny island off the coast of France where he bunks in a local hotel with waterside views.

Other Wings of Eagles pilots include a onetime officer of the Australian Air Force and a few mountain climbers, one of whom recently called Hall from the face of a 20,000-foot peak in Tibet, just to say hello. One pilot runs the Tampa Bay Brewing Co., a bar and restaurant in Ybor City.

The job isn't for everyone, however. For example, it's not for Chris Gregory, a former pilot for Southwest and Continental Airlines who has run his own part-time, one-man domestic-based airplane ferry business out of Clearwater since 1999.

Gregory has spoken with Hall before, but he won't fly planes for him. Gregory got laid off from Continental in October and his air ferry service has been near dormant for the past year, but he still won't fly for Wings of Eagles.

"It's for people who don't want to have families and are really courageous," Gregory says. "It takes a special breed."

'Very fussy'

Past training, Hall's other specialty lies in preparation: Both in the safety equipment and the financial legwork that goes into getting paid for every trip.

Hall is a big spender on safety. Every plane is equipped with three GPS systems, including one handheld device that uses a high-end backup battery system. And James Bond has nothing on Hall's pilots, as a few have recently begun wearing watches with a face that doubles as a GPS personal location finder. "I'm very fussy," about safety equipment, Hall says.

Hall's also particular about the fuel equipment necessary to facilitate such long flights. When he realized that no company sold a fuel tank that could fit into the passenger seat of a Cessna, for example, Hall decided to build his own. He has since hired a few mechanics and welders who build tanks that can hold more than 100 gallons of fuel.

Another aspect of the preparation lies in the business side: Getting paid. Since Hall has to work with different cultures and currencies, he has worked hard to set up a system over the years. He only accepts money over wire transfers, as cash is too risky and checks take too long to clear.

A ferry trip can bring in anywhere from $10,000 to $50,000 in fees, says Hall, depending on how far the trip is and what airplane is being delivered. A pilot gets about $2,500 a flight and all his expenses are paid by Hall - including a return trip to Tampa International on a commercial airline.

Hall says he makes about a 10% to 20% profit on each Wings of Eagles flight. One overlaying factor in his margins is the destination country. Landing fees and other costs vary widely. No country, says Hall, is as tough as China.

"[Chinese officials] are always finding a way to wrestle defeat out of the jaws of victory," Hall says. "They are very shrewd."

Still, Hall, who spends most of his days - and nights - monitoring the whereabouts of his pilots and making sure they are OK, says he never got into the business with dollar signs in his sights.

"I get to live a dream," says Hall. "For 41 years, I've been on an imaginary fairy tale."