Hint: It's In The Genes

In his career as a pilot, 71-year old Pat Epps has been an aerobatic pilot, rescued an ice-bound warbird and has created one of the friendliest, most profitable FBOs in the South. All the time, he's remembered the advice of his father, aviation pioneer Ben T. Epps, who began flying in 1907: "When you're flying, you've got to know where you're going — and you've got to keep your alternatives open. If I get blocked in one direction, I go another."

Epps Aviation at Peachtree-Dekalb Airport is an Atlanta-area institution, steadily expanding for the past 40-years. "I used to get a call a week," he told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution recently. "I enjoy what I do. I've got good people operating the business. I only work five or six days a week -- and then it's only for eight hours a day. It's not nearly as demanding as it used to be."

Perhaps one reason is the help he gets from his son, Patrick, and his two daughters, Marian and Elaine. Together, they give the FBO a family feel -- in a time when its all corporate glass and chrome.

"My emphasis is on service, not the bottom line," he told the Atlanta paper. "You have to watch your costs, and you can't spend money you don't have. But if you pay attention to the customer, you're going to come out all right."

That's the philosophy he developed during the past decade when, at one point, business was so bad he had to lay off people and even clean the bathrooms himself in order to save the money he would have paid a janitor. It's a lesson you don't have to teach his daughter, Marian, more than once.

"I know how hard he's worked

 to get what he has," she told the Journal-Constitution, "and it's my job to protect it."

You might remember Epps as the driving force behind the recovery of "Glacier Girl," a P-38 stuck in the ice of Greenland much the way a bug might be entombed in amber. In all, the Journal-Constitution reports, Epps made seven trips to help carefully recover and restore the Lightning.

"It was something I got into by accident and there was no graceful way out," he told the paper. "I'm stubborn, so I just had to see it through."

Epps, who lost his father in an aviation accident when he was only three, is indeed a... well, he probably wouldn't mind the term "stubborn" -- man.

"He's very driven and focused on the goal," his friend, auto parts company owner Don Brooks told the Atlanta paper. Brooks helped finance some of the Glacier Girl expeditions. "We had some dissension on our expeditions, some indecision. Pat would listen for a while. Then he'd step in and say, 'OK, this is the way it's going to be,' and everyone respected him for it. He has a rare ability to pull people together and get things done in the face of overwhelming adversity."

FMI: www.eppsaviation.com