A little Bo Hendrick
For years, one of the best moments during a shift in Flight Data arrived over the phone the same way every single time:
"This is Bo Hendrick from Lake City Florida, LCQ, and I'm calling to request a NOTAM for our tower being open other than published hours."
That sentence probably doesn’t sound like much at first so let me give you a little context. Lake City Gateway Airport sits about three miles east of downtown Lake City, Florida. It started as a flying club field in the 1930s, spent World War II as Naval Air Station Lake City turning out Ventura and Harpoon crews, and came back to the city when the Navy was done with it. It is not a sleepy place. HAECO does heavy maintenance there on Boeings, Airbuses, C-130s and P-3s. The USDA runs an air tanker base for wildfire season. Trauma One flies out of there, along with the Florida Forest Service, the Highway Patrol, and Fish and Wildlife.
The tower's published hours are 8:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Monday through Friday. Airliners coming off a maintenance line aren’t concerned about scheduled hours. Wildfires tend to disregard schedules and so do medical emergencies. When the tower was going to be open outside its published hours, somebody had to tell the FAA and the pilots that they had tower support. Published hours are charted data. A change to them is exactly what the NOTAM system exists for — the temporary, the unanticipated, the unscheduled.
That somebody was Bo and he would call in the change.
Bo Hendrick is one of those rare people whose kindness is so warm you can feel it through a telephone line. You can’t fake that, I’m not sure you can even learn that, and most of us go whole lives without meeting more than a couple of people who have it, if we’re lucky.
We were glad when his call came in. Whoever picked it up — that was the person who needed a little Bo Hendrick that day, and they carried it around with them for the rest of the shift. He told us he appreciated us. He told us he thought well of us. He told us he looked forward to talking to us.
Nobody is required to do that. He did it nearly every night for years and I can’t tell you how much we appreciated it.
Bo recently retired after sixty years in aviation, most of it at Lake City Gateway. Sixty years! Think about what he watched change — the airplanes, the radios, the charts, the whole machinery of how information gets from a tower cab to a cockpit. He outlasted most of it but he stayed kind the entire time. The technology changed but Bo didn’t.
There is a lot of conversation right now about which parts of our work an AI could do instead of a person. What a system could not have done is be on the other end of that line — and what it certainly could not have done is make the person on this end of the line feel like their work mattered to somebody.
Two humans, one phone call, a few minutes a couple of nights a week but it’s enough to make a connection. Bo understood that better than most of us.
We miss his calls.
Thank you, Bo. Sixty years, and every one of them spent making the people around you better at what they do. Blue skies and enjoy every minute of it.
Got a favorite caller of your own? Somebody on the other end of the line who made your day better? Tell us about them in the comments.
