“Flying is something I always wanted to do,” recalled Storm. “When I was a kid, I would get up on top of the swing post so that I could see further, looking over the top of the swing post. I could see my uncle’s place from about a mile and a half away.”

He got his first airplane ride when he was a freshman in high school at an air show.

“You had to pay by the pound; it was a penny a pound, and that guy got about $1.35 for taking me up,” Storm recalled. “The pay-by-pound rides were pretty popular back then.”

Storm has never lost that enchantment with the sky. His entire face lights up when he talks about being in the air and looking down at the wonders of the earth below.

-Messenger photo by Lori Berglund
The Iowa Aviation Museum near Greenfield shows off plenty of vintage aircraft as well as military planes and equipment.

“I just enjoyed all of it,” Storm said. “Seeing the world from the top down. It was always pretty to watch the crops change. And I was flying low where I could wave the wings at a kid on the ground. Iowa, from the top down, or just the world, is really beautiful.”

After a long career as a charter pilot, instructor, flight service owner, and fixed base operator (FBO) for the Webster City Municipal Airport, Storm retired in 2013.This summer, the Iowa Aviation Museum near Greenfield honored Storm with induction into the Iowa Aviation Hall of Fame.

It was an unexpected honor that both humbled and thrilled Storm and his wife, Susan. He is quick to give great credit to his wife for helping Storm Flying Service and the local airport grow into one of the busiest airports of its size in Iowa, and even the Midwest, during his heyday years.

The couple married in 1967 and started Storm Flying Service in 1968 when he became FBO at Iowa Falls. They moved to Webster City in 1972 when he was named airport manager here.

Often unnoticed in the community, Storm Flying Service typically had five or more pilots in the sky on any given day, ferrying people and products all over the United States and Canada. Storm was one of the pilots, while Susan ran things on the ground.

“She ran the business, and I got to go flying,” Storm explained. “She had to know where all of the pilots were, where they were headed that day, and what they were hauling. I had it easy compared to her.”

Of course, anyone who saw Storm crop dusting would hardly call that easy. He was cautious, but fearless when spraying a field of corn. Confidence in the plane, and his own abilities, went a long way to establishing a perfect safety record over decades of flying small aircraft.

Crop dusting was the most visible service, but Storm Flying Service flew a little bit of everything, from cancelled checks, to biologicals, even live animals and deceased residents being brought home for burial.

It was not uncommon for the phone to ring in the middle of the night with a panicked request from someone who needed to get somewhere across the country in a hurry. It was Susan Storm who answered those calls for help.

“We answered the phone 24 hours a day,” she recalled. “There wasn’t any, ‘Leave a message and we’ll call you back.'”

One of those flights, Storm still recalls, were for some local parents after two 13-year-old girls had run away and made it all the way to International Falls at the Canadian border before being picked up by police and kindly escorted to jail. This was back in the late 1960s, early 1970s, when hitch-hiking was popular.

Storm got the plane out of the hangar, set a flight plan, and got the worried parents in the air. But he made it to International Falls even faster than they expected.

“They said, ‘It’s not dark enough outside yet. Let’s wait a bit,” Storm recalled. Perhaps a little more time with the police would leave a more lasting impression on the girls. But it wasn’t too long before the girls were recovered and Storm and the girls were back in the air with their parents.

“I sat up front alone,” Storm said of the flight home. “There was a lot of bonding going on in the back of the plane,” he recalled with a sly chuckle.

Storm has flown many area residents home after being injured or becoming sick while far away from home. He remembers flying one woman home after she broke her leg in Canada.

“We flew over Lake Superior and it was just like crossing the ocean,” Storm said. “You got out there and you could see nothing but water.”

Storm has even helped in local search-and-rescue missions. When a report of two men clinging to an overturned canoe on a flooded Boone River was reported to the Hamilton County 911 Dispatch Center several years ago, it was Storm who flew low over the river to find exactly where the men were and direct rescue crews on the ground as to where to launch a rescue boat.

There are few places in North America where he hasn’t flown. Fishing trips to Canada were especially popular, as he could get clients safely to remote lakes in Canada in just a matter of hours.

He had taken a charter group to Canada on a fishing excursion in early September 2001 and was flying his clients back home on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. They had been fishing in a remote area of Canada, without the benefit — or perhaps burden — of today’s cell phones.

“We were quite a ways up, Pickle Lake,” Storm recalled. “I stopped in Red Lake, Canada, and that was the first time we really talked with air traffic control.”

Storm and his clients had no idea of what had happened on that day of terror, nor any clue that all aviation had been grounded, both in the United States and Canada.

“The cops came around the airplane and the Ontario Provincial Police said, ‘I don’t know where you guys have been, but aviation is shut down.'”

Three police cars were stationed around the plane and all onboard were ordered to exit the plane one at a time.

“They were ready to fight bear,” Storm said. “We had to kind of slide out of the plane. I told the guys, ‘Just be really respectful and don’t be smart. This is not a time for that.

“They put us all in different cars, but I was ready,” Storm said. “I had all of my paperwork with me, and it went really well. They apologized and said, ‘Can we do anything for you?’ I said, ‘Well, you could give us a ride into town.'”

Eventually, Storm was able to call his wife at home and learn more about the tragic events of the day. It would be two or three more days before he was allowed to fly home, a feat more difficult considering they still had to cross the border and the airspace was still closed. It was another two weeks before regular flights would resume.

“We were still spraying, so we couldn’t do that,” Susan Storm recalled. “Everything was shut down. We couldn’t do training flights, charters, anything.”

Storm has held both a commercial and private flying license. He was a certified instructor, as well as pilot examiner, and led the Iowa Central Community College aviation program.

Susan Storm also holds a private pilot’s license and is a great co-pilot for her husband. He recalled a family trip to Florida when traffic in the air was getting thick and the ocean below them was casting a heavy darkness in the sky.

“We were hauling grandkids and she was in the back with them,” Storm recalled. “I said, ‘You’ve got to come up and help me. It’s black out there and I was getting tired.”

They have always made a good team. While the Hall of Fame induction was for Storm, both Ralph and Susan Storm are listed on an engraved plaque as ‘Pioneers of Aviation’ at the museum near Greenfield.

Storm is in good company as a Hall of Fame member. Other inductees have included astronaut Peggy Whitson, World War II Guadalcanal Marine Corps pilot Col. Jack Conger, and Lt. Gen. Charles Horner, a combat-flying veteran of Vietnam and forward commander during the Persian Gulf War.