The late William Reals, a Wichita pathologist and a leading authority on human factors that contribute to aircraft crashes, has been selected for the 2014 Governor’s Aviation award.
Reals was involved in the investigations of two well-known accidents: the 1965 crash of an Air Force KC-135 tanker in a north Wichita neighborhood that killed 30 people, and the 1970 crash of a charter plane that killed 31 Wichita State University football players, staff members and fans on a Colorado mountainside.
Wichita aviation photographer Paul Bowen and former Boeing flight test pilot Leroy Felix have been selected for induction into the Kansas Aviation Hall of Fame.
The three will be honored at an event at the Kansas Aviation Museum on Oct. 28.
“They’re all three incredibly worthy candidates,” said Kansas Aviation Museum executive director Lon Smith. “We’re very excited to be inducting them into the Hall of Fame this year.”
Until this year, the Hall of Fame inductions were made under the auspices of the state, but are now handled by the Kansas Aviation Museum.
“They didn’t want responsibility for the cost … and for coordinating everything,” Smith said.
In addition, it will be the first time that the event honoring the three inductees will be held separately from the museum’s annual gala, a main fundraiser for the museum.
Holding the awards ceremony and the gala at the same time shortchanged the inductees, said Smith, adding that the award winners deserved more recognition.
“What was happening, we were rushing through the Hall of Fame induction because we wanted people to get back to having fun and helping us raise money,” Smith said. “We weren’t really honoring the inductees the way we should.”
The annual gala, now called Lollairpalooza, will be held Saturday, Sept. 13. It will have a 1920s theme. Individual tickets are still available at $125.
William Reals
William Reals was born in Rapid City, S.D., and moved to Wichita after medical school. He was instrumental in helping the aviation industry develop safety measures because of his work investigating accidents and conducting pathology reports on the victims of fatal crashes, Smith said.
Those safety measures helped prevent future crashes, he said.
After completing a pathology residency in Omaha, Reals worked at St. Joseph Hospital, now part of Via Christi Health, starting in 1950, according to information from the University of Kansas School of Medicine in Wichita.
Reals left for two years to serve in the Korean War, then returned to Wichita as chief pathologist.
In the early 1960s, the Federal Aviation Administration asked Reals, a pilot himself, to help investigate aircraft accidents.
The most famous crash he investigated was the 1976 collision of two jet airliners that killed 577 people in the Canary Islands. It was the single deadliest commercial aviation crash on record.
After the tanker crash in Wichita, Reals conducted autopsies of the seven crew members at the request of McConnell Air Force Base. The plane had taken off from McConnell before it crashed into a neighborhood at Piatt and 20th Street.
The crew members died of massive injuries. In some cases, they could only be identified by their dog tags or uniform patches.
A plan to respond to a disaster such as that had just been finalized by a group of local officials, including Reals, who was president of the Medical Society of Sedgwick County at that time.
Reals thought the plan had worked well, according to the KU Medical School information.
In the case of the WSU charter plane crash, Reals flew to Colorado to conduct an autopsy of the pilot, who he found, had died of relatively minor injuries, considering the massive destruction of the plane.
He also found evidence that had been missed by earlier investigators at the site. And he was upset that the pilot’s body had been embalmed by a local funeral home before an autopsy could be performed, which made a toxicology report almost impossible.
“I feel we would have made a larger contribution both in the autopsy study of the pilot and also in the examination of the other passengers and air crew if we had been called into the investigation much earlier, he had written, according to the KU Medical School information.
Reals’ family has donated Reals’ records of his work to the KU School of Medicine-Wichita, except for the file on the Canary Islands crash, which was restricted by the U.S. government, it said.
He wrote two books on the investigation of aircraft accidents.
His daily work, however, was conducting autopsies at St. Joseph, and analyzing tissue, blood and body fluid samples of patients being treated there.
In 1980, Reals joined the KU School of Medicine-Wichita and continued to lecture on aviation pathology. He also worked as a consultant to aircraft manufacturers such as Boeing and Cessna, the school said.
Reals died in 2002; his wife, Norma, died in 2013.
The KU School of Medicine will host a reception for Reals on Tuesday, Sept. 16, from 4:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.
Paul Bowen
Bowen was inducted into the San Diego Air & Space Museum International Hall of Fame last year.
“He’s one of the premier aviation photographers on the planet,” Smith said.
Bowen grew up in the Los Angeles area, earned a zoology degree and planned to become a dentist.
Instead, he came to Wichita, took up a camera and fell into photography as a career.
Soon, he was shooting air-to-air shots of corporate jets and other planes almost exclusively.
His signature shots feature vortices aerials that capture the swirling currents of air produced by the tip of a moving airplane wing apparent in clouds or fog.
His credits include more than 1,000 magazine covers and countless inside photos, print ads, product brochures, pamphlets and press kits.
Almost every major airplane maker and five aviation magazines employ Bowen for his aerial imagery.
Bowen has published a series of “Air to Air” coffee-table books of his work and produces an annual calendar.
Dale Felix
Dale Felix, who began flying at age 17, joined Boeing Wichita in 1957. Over the next 21 years, he logged 3,000 flight hours testing B-52s.
He spent hours in flight development and developed, for example, a new yaw damper and a stick steering autopilot for use in aerial refueling and low-level terrain flying.
Felix wrote the operating manual about the systems and developed the procedure for landing the B-52 with the elevator and rudder power systems inoperative.
When a Seattle crew crashed a B-52 because of a horizontal stabilizer failure, Felix flew a series of tests to determine the cause.
Boeing at one time placed a “red phone” in his office and his home. The phone was a direct line to a Strategic Air Command Post with a relay to any SAC B-52 crew with an emergency. It was his job to help the pilot land safely. He received a number of calls during the Vietnam War.
“He did amazing work to help train pilots, but also to make that plane function optimally for various situations,” Smith said.
“It was a high-level bomber,” Smith said, but it was also used as a low-level bomber in Vietnam.
In late 1978, Felix joined Learjet as an experimental test pilot to conduct developmental and certification flight tests. He flew the Learjet 31 and other models.
He completed his career by serving as an FAA aircraft certification test pilot and tested airplanes at Beechcraft, Cessna, Learjet and other manufacturers.
Felix earned a degree in aeronautical engineering and a commission in the Air Force ROTC at Purdue University. He joined the Air Force in 1952 and flew test and support missions for the Air Research and Development Command at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico.
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