By Joe Murray

The van was parked on the edge of the grass runway at Barber Airport. It was missing a hubcap and the big sliding door on the passenger side was wide open. I swear the van wasn’t there when I turned downwind to land on the north runway. Somehow, it just appeared at the end of the east runway during the brief time it took my airplane to descend below the tree line and touch down on the dry grass and dirt.

As I taxied to the old FBO shack looking for the owner of the airport, I noticed there was a man inside the van. It wasn’t until later that I learned his name was Arnold Howell, and he was a former steel worker from Youngstown. The grass near the runway was his favorite parking place when he came out to the airport. He was sitting on the van’s running board, smack in the center of the open doorway. He was a big fellow, with short, blackish-gray hair and he was wearing a flannel shirt even though it was August.

His feet were on the ground and his eyes were absolutely fixed on the late morning sky. From seeing him settled into this spot, I got a strange feeling that maybe he had been out there a lot longer than I knew. I remember thinking that, with a stake hold so near the runway, he must really like to watch airplanes. This would explain things. Except, today all of the airplanes at this small northeast Ohio airport were tucked inside the well-worn hangars, or tied down in the grass.

Hawk Eye

No one else was flying. As best I could tell, the sky was empty for a hundred miles. You couldn’t see airplanes. You couldn’t hear an engine, and there was no chatter on the Unicom frequency. It was kind of a Twilight Zone moment—just Arnold Howell and me at an airport full of parked airplanes, with everyone gone missing, and Howell looking up intently at the sky.

It was probably a good thing for Howell that it was so quiet. If an itinerant Taylorcraft happened to sneak up behind him for a crosswind landing on the east runway, he may have gotten a free haircut. But it didn’t, and he didn’t. He just sat there squat on the floor of the van, narrowing one eye toward the northeast sky like he was watching for Halley’s comet. Subscribe to PilotMag and get the rest of the story.