One Pilot's Log

The career of one of the USA's most colourful aviationists is told by his son, drawing on the extensive family photography collection and four months of taping his father's reminiscences during an exhilarating period in American aviation history. From the days of landing in open corn fields with the wind at his face to blind instrument landings in a snowstorm, E.L. "Slonnie" Sloniger was behind the controls of an airplane, open cockpit or closed. Slonnie looped the loop over Nebraska, averted bandits to deliver payrolls in Mexico, and served as an aviation ambassador, inaugurating commercial flight in China. As a pursuit pilot, barnstormer, racer, test pilot, acrobatic pilot, and, ultimately a commercial pilot, Slonnie grew with aviation. Slonnie learned to fly when he entered the heavier-than-air division of the army, because he "just didn't want to walk" and served in the Air Service in WWI. Upon his return to the US, Slonnie bought his own plane, a Curtiss JN-4 "Canuck", and became a barnstormer, selling rides in small towns across the Middle western plains. He flew for early airlines when the biggest customer was the US mail and saw the beginnings of the major lines. Slonnie was the original senior pilot, Number One, for American Airlines and flew for them for twenty years.