Humans of the Ozarks: 'Aviation was really our world. It broadened the scope of our lives'

Jane Ann Johnson doesn’t miss a beat when I ask what led her to become a pilot.

“I can take it down to one word: jealousy,” she says, a charming Texas drawl still slightly noticeable after decades in the Ozarks.

She was a 22-year-old nurse arranging for a patient’s blood work at a Houston hospital when a medical school student moonlighting as a phlebotomist caught her eye.

“I had grown up in a company-owned town and I was about as sophisticated as an earthworm,” she said.

The medical student, John, was so cash-strapped he could only afford coffee in the hospital cafeteria for their first several dates, she said.

“I was even afraid to order pie out of fear he couldn’t afford it. So when I say we had coffee, I mean we had coffee,” she said.

Three weeks later, she bought a ticket and boarded an airplane for the first time, an Ozarks Airline flight bound for Springfield, Missouri, where her new beau was home visiting his parents.

As the overhead bins rattled from turbulence, she remembers thinking she was in a flying chicken coop.

But when she landed, there was her boyfriend, standing in a three-piece suit.

John had a pilot’s license.

“One of our first real dates, he rented a [Cessna] 150 somewhere around Houston and took me for a night flight over the city. In reality, it was a test to see whether I was going to be up to flying,” Johnson said.

She passed the test.

“Flying…it was incredible. The stars above and the city lights below. We had to manually pull the plane out of the hangar. Then we had to manually push it back in,” she recalls.

Before long, the two married. And that jealousy soon kicked in, Johnson said.

When they gathered with medical friends, she could follow the conversation along just fine.

“But when we got with his aviation friends, they might as well have been speaking Greek. I didn’t know a flap from a strut,” Johnson said.

And since flying was a passion of her new husband’s, the young bride foresaw a long and irritating road ahead.

The year was 1969. The Tet Offensive had already occurred; the Pentagon Papers had not yet been published.

Now a doctor, John was assigned to Randolph Air Force Base as a flight surgeon for elite jet pilots heading off to war. The San Antonio base also functioned as the training ground for the Vietnam air force.

And the base had an Aero Club. Jane Ann Johnson signed up for flight lessons, her husband cheering her on.

“We only had one car. And in order for me to get around the base, I had to ride a bicycle. Well, short skirts were still in. And I had long legs. So I made quite an impression going to flight lessons,” she said.

Before long, her eyes were scanning the skies for traffic, and she was speaking in terms of air speed, lift and RPM.

It didn’t bother her much that the instructor was so relaxed he slept through most of her lessons.

“He kept saying, ‘Those men get in there with their testosterone and they yank those planes around. But the women use judgment and finesse,’” Johnson said.

Alone in the cockpit, she’d fly to a nearby airfield to practice exercises.

“When I would come back in to land, I’d be 24th in line, and I couldn’t even understand what they were saying because the Vietnamese airmen were speaking to each other,” she said.

So she became very, very good at circling the runway, she said.

Johnson eventually became a psychiatric nurse with CoxHealth. She’s writing a book on the history of the Springfield Downtown Airport on Division Street.

Today, she and her husband are part owners of the Gimlin airstrip adjacent to their home in Ozark. They own two private aircraft.

“Aviation was really our world. It broadened the scope of our lives,” Johnson said.