Courtesy of Wilton Little

Wilton Little served as a pilot in World War II.

Eric Brady | The Roanoke Times

Wilton Little leaves his plane at Roanoke Regional Airport after another successful flight.

Courtesy of Wilton Little

Wilton Little flew supplies into China during World War II. The missions were notorious for the dangers imposed by weather.

Eric Brady | The Roanoke Times

Wilton Little, 90, takes off from the Roanoke Regional Airport last month in his Cessna airplane. He has 24,000 hours flight time since he began flying when he was 15, including flying "the Hump" during World War II.

He tossed his cane into the back seat first.

Then Wilton Little hoisted his stooped frame into the narrow cockpit and buckled in.

"Clear the prop," he called before the plane's single engine rumbled to life.

Wind buffeted the little Cessna as it sat by the hangar at Roanoke Regional Airport with Little at the stick and two passengers.

"It's not too windy, is it?" one of the passengers asked.

"I don't know," Little said. And then, with a wry grin: "We'll find out."

Soon, the plane was headed into the wind on runway 34, and up. It buzzed and climbed, buzzed and climbed, and then Little leveled it off, banked left and headed south for Martinsville.

Bouncing between a gray layer of clouds and Roanoke below, it was as if the little plane dangled from string.

Up here, Little's body's revolt against its many years of use is all but forgotten.

Little is 90, but, in the air, he is as able as ever.

He has spent more than 3 percent of all his time on Earth suspended above it in one plane or another. That's 24,000 hours in the air. One thousand entire days, or nearly three years.

The Federal Aviation Administration recently gave Little its Wright Brothers Master Pilot Award for a minimum of 50 years of safe flying.

Little has lived in that rare sphere where work and joy occupy the same space.

"Any job I had that was flying," he said, "I would have done it for nothing."

***

Little was 7, growing up in Owensboro, Ky., when Charles Lindbergh made his famous first transatlantic flight.

That's when the bug bit him.

"Everybody I knew was interested in flying. It just sent everybody crazy," he said. "I knew I had to fly after that."

His chance would finally come in 1935, in the midst of the Depression.

A man at the gas station down the street -- "In those days, you hung around the gas station" -- bought a 38-horsepower Taylor Cub and offered to teach Little and a friend to fly. They would meet up before school in the mornings. Little's parents didn't know what he was up to.

After just four hours of training, at age 15, Little made his first solo flight.

He ran straight home and quietly roused his mom. He wanted to show her something, he told her, and they shouldn't wake his father. "He just didn't go for airplanes."

He put his mother in the front seat of the plane and took his second solo flight with her as a passenger.

"She was as adventurous as I am, I guess," he said. "I gave her a good flight."

Little was more smitten with flight than ever. And being a flier added to his own appeal.

"You fly?!" girls would ask. "They loved that," he said. "They couldn't stand it."

But it was the Depression, and gas for a plane was a luxury.

Little's father was a Princeton grad, a lawyer by training, but ultimately a mill owner in practice. In the 1920s, he had bought some British technologies for milling and bleaching flour and set up a mill that became Owensboro's largest employer -- until the Depression hit.

The family lost the mill and never fully recovered.

Little went to work for 25 cents an hour, digging trenches for a gas company, but it wasn't to support the family. It was to fund his flying habit.

He was an all-state tackle on his high school football team, and his coach had gotten him the job. The digging was tough. "I was hard as nails," he said.

He shared the trench with men in their 50s.

"They had a wife and children at home ... and all I had was a thirsty airplane."

He went off to college for a while, but didn't love it.

And then, the United States entered World War II.

***

"I wanted to be a fighter pilot. ... That's where the glory was," Little said.

But at 6 feet 1 inch, he was too tall, and wound up initially ferrying B-24 bombers from factories to bases where they were set up for battle.

That led him ultimately to one of the most dangerous flying assignments in the war: "flying the Hump."

The Hump was the Himalayan Mountains. Early in the war, the Japanese had sealed off the Burma Road, cutting off supply lines from India to northern China, where the United States flew missions against the Japanese.

The solution was to carry supplies across the mountains -- and hopefully out of reach of Japanese fighters.

But the route meant rapid climbs in heavily laden planes, unreliable maps and charts, icing, and radical shifts in weather.

Some 1,200 men died flying the Hump, and 500 aircraft were lost.

Little said the joke was you could find your way to China by following the trail of aluminum.

He piloted a B-24 rigged to carry cargo, not bombs. He delivered everything from fuel to a load of long-handled shovels to beer rations.

It was with a load of beer that he had his closest call.

Loaded to the limit with the stuff, the plane began icing as it passed over the Himalayas at something close to 20,000 feet. Then one of the plane's four engines died, and the plane began to lose altitude.

Little said he was in a valley, so he began circling and ordered the other men onboard to open the cargo hatch and throw off cases of beer until they were light enough to regain altitude.

They limped home but never lived down the experience.

"We were known up and down ... as the ones who threw the beer out."

Others weren't as lucky. With the war near its end, the focus was on delivering fuel. The B-24s would carry 5,100 gallons at a time, most of which was siphoned off on arrival, leaving just enough for the plane to return to India.

When the military began offering beer incentives to pilots who returned with the least fuel left -- and therefore made the most efficient deliveries -- pilots pushed their limits further.

Planes were running out of fuel and going down all over the place, Little said.

Little survived his 13 months and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross -- an award whose first recipient was Little's boyhood hero, Charles Lindbergh.

***

Little was discharged in 1945 and got a job flying charters for Greenbrier Airlines in West Virginia.

"I always said I never worked after that," he said. Flying wasn't work. For a while, he managed the mountaintop airport Ingalls Field near The Homestead, until he heard a company in Roanoke was looking for a pilot.

The company turned out to be American Motor Inns, a hotel chain owned by Joel and Adolph Krisch.

"We'll try you out for a year," Little recalled the brothers telling him.

They ended up flying together almost daily for 30 years, visiting hotels from Maine to Florida.

Little retired in 1987 but wasn't ready to quit work. He got on with Piedmont Airlines, flying charters. No one seemed concerned about his age, or at least they didn't ask.

Then one day, he was called into the office and told to bring his passport. When company officials learned they'd hired a 68-year-old pilot, they let him go immediately, Little said.

***

Since then, flying has been only a passion, not a source of income for Little.

In 1988, he bought the little 1971 Cessna Skyhawk four-seater he still owns.

These days, he hangs around Landmark Aviation's Hangar 17 at the Roanoke airport and flies once a week with friends to get lunch someplace, like Martinsville.

"He's a great pilot, and he's still into it," said his friend and fellow pilot Al Willis, 85. "He can fly about anything that has wings."

And he's still learning. Just a few years ago, Little got rated to fly sea planes.

He's certified on land and sea single-engine planes, multi-engine land planes and gliders.

Aviation remains a consuming interest.

That's apparent from the Southwest Roanoke County home he shares with his second wife, Valerie Little. The place is full of photos of Little with planes, models, even a stack of wings from the radio-controlled planes he used to fly as a hobby.

Little has three children, all in their 50s and 60s. His first wife, Nancy Emmett Little, died of a heart attack many years ago.

Little himself has been plenty healthy, at least by FAA standards. He has to pass regular medical exams to keep his license.

"That's his life, to fly," Willis said. "When he gets where he can't fly, I don't know what'll happen to him then."

***

In the restaurant in Blue Ridge Airport near Martinsville, Little chatted with two Marine aviators who had flown down for lunch in a small passenger jet from Andrews Air Force Base.

Someone told them Little had flown the Hump during World War II.

Their eyebrows went up. "Wow," one of them said.

"How many hours do you have, sir?" the other asked.

"Twenty-four," Little replied.

"Twenty-four?"

"Thousand."

"Twenty-four THOUSAND?!"

Little ate his usual lunch -- a barbecue sandwich without the bun -- and watched the Marines take off.

What is it he so loves about flying? Little can't put his finger on it. The freedom, maybe? He's not sure, and not especially philosophical about it.

And what of that day when he can't fly?

"I don't know. I just don't know."

Back in the air, he pointed out landmarks to his passengers. Philpott Lake and dam, Rocky Mount, Cahas Mountain. He let one of the passengers take the stick for a few minutes.

Little folded his hands in his lap. He looked over the gauges, and then out over the dashboard to the horizon. The plane bobbed gently. A slight smile hovered on his lips.

With the Roanoke airport in sight, he called the tower.

"Niner-eight-five-eight-golf, are we clear to land?"

"Clear to land, runway three-four," the tower responded.

A passenger requested a gentle landing.

"You never make two the same," Little said, with the runway rising up to the plane.

But he brought it in so soft and level, a baby could have slept through it.

Twenty-four thousand hours. And counting.