Local pilot receives FAA's highest honor

The Federal Aviation Administration honored Charlie Sherman at the Lincoln Airport Open House last weekend with an award honoring him for several decades of safe flying.

Jeff Vercoe, a Lincoln resident and pilot who works for the FAA as the Safety Program manager, presented Sherman with the Wright Brothers Master Pilot Award, which recognizes pilots who have flown for 50 years without any violations or license revocations on his record.

Vercoe said it's considered the highest award a pilot can receive from the FAA.

"Part of our meaning for this is, you have to be serious about being a pilot," Vercoe said. "It's not kind of a willy nilly thing."

Sherman began his career in aviation in a less than auspicious way while working as a "ramp guy" for Northwestern Airline in Alaska in the early sixties.

"I got the job of dumping the lavatories," he said. I had the honor of it all coming down on me. It was 32 below zero. I went to walk into the terminal, took three steps and fell on the ground. They brought this cart out. They didn't want to touch me, but they picked me up, got me downstairs and hosed me down. That's the start of my career."

From there he went on to work on avionics and eventually got his pilots license in 1965. He later got his license as a flight instructor and went on to a 25-year career as an airline pilot for Western Airlines.

In a brief presentation in front of friends, fellow pilots and the locals gathered in Jerry Cain's hangar, Vercoe gave Sherman both the award and a certified copy of his entire airman's record since he began flying. Sherman said he was honored to receive the Master Pilot Award, and was candid about some of the problems he's faced along the way.

"I had problems with my drinking. A few years ago, they threw a net over me and said 'Mr. Sherman, were going to have to send you off to a facility, but you get to keep your medical.' That took about two months to go to 'Whisky School' is what they called it," he said. "That was the very best thing that ever happened to me in my life, with regard to my health and being able to have this, because there was a way through all that business I had to go through. So, I've been sober since 1982."

"It's a heck of a man who can admit that," Vercoe said.

Five people wrote letters of support for his award, Sherman said, including his friend of ten years Sergei Sikorsky, the eldest son of legendary aviation designer and helicopter pioneer Igor Sikorsky.

"He wrote me a hell of a nice letter, and three or four other people wrote me nice letters," Sherman said. "I probably don't deserve all of it."

Though Sherman said he never thought too much about the award, which he could have received in Arizona last year, he said that didn't work out well, so he opted to have the presentation here, where he's had a hangar for abut 12 years and among people he knows.