photo by: Chad Lawhorn/Journal-World

Dave McFarlane, founder of McFarlane Aviation, shows a visitor some of the products the Vinland company produces.

It was an opportunity of a lifetime.

Granted, it had been a short lifetime, but still, this was a wonderful opportunity. Well, yes, it did involve a defaulted loan, but defaulted loans often are wonderful opportunities simply disguised as cold sweats and severe chest pains.

No, this automotive service station in the tiny Iowa town of Arlington was a real opportunity for Dave McFarlane in 1965. Really.

You see, McFarlane’s father had come to own this business. Well, to be more precise, he had come to own it again. If we must get into those details, the father had owned it once before, but sold it on a pay-as-you-go contract to a fellow. That fellow wasn’t so good at seizing opportunity, apparently, because he defaulted on the contract, and thus, ownership reverted back to Dave’s dad.

You could say that the father maybe wasn’t that excited about owning the business again, or maybe he just didn’t want his son to lose out on an opportunity. It surely was the latter when, a couple of years after reacquiring the business, the father handed the keys to his son.

Dad told Dave that the rent would be reasonable, but he now owned the garage business. Yep, that is what he told his son — his 16-year old son.

No, of course he didn’t simply turn over an entire, full-time business to his 16-year old son. He turned over half of it. Dave’s brother owned the other half — his 15-year old brother.

It turns out this brotherly duo was pretty good at seizing opportunity. They hired a man to run the station during school day hours, and the brothers often worked until 8 p.m. each night changing oil, fixing tires and finishing up other work for customers.

“He believed you needed to learn life skills and pay your own way,” McFarlane said of his father, Sonny. “We pretty much paid our own way through high school.”

But, Dave McFarlane today is not an Iowa service station magnate. Instead, he was more interested in what a different pair of brothers had done. The Wright brothers and the freedom of flight had caught Dave’s interest. He used some of his first earnings from the station to buy flight lessons. He took his first solo flight on a Valentine’s Day.

On Thursday, McFarlane reconnected with the Wrights. McFarlane — who went on to become the founder of an aviation parts manufacturing business in the tiny Douglas County community of Vinland — received “the most prestigious aviation award” given by the Federal Aviation Administration.

Actually, an FAA official from Wichita gave him two such awards — the Wright Brothers Master Pilot award for more than 50 years of exemplary service as a pilot and the Charles Taylor Master Mechanic award for 50-plus years as an aviation mechanic.

His employees at McFarlane Aviation — located just across the street from the Vinland fairgrounds, where the biggest attraction is chicken noodle dinners and homemade pie — had gathered together to surprise him with the awards. His wife, Phylis, pinned the two button-like awards on his shirt — appropriately enough, just above his heart.

•••

The first part that McFarlane Aviation ever made was just slightly larger than the Orville and Wilbur Wright button that Dave now wears on his shirt. It was a plastic washer.

Many small, single-engine aircraft — like Cessnas– came out of the factory with 16 of these plastic washers that were part of the mechanism underneath the plane’s seats. There was a near universal consensus about these factory washers: They were terrible.

photo by: Chad Lawhorn/Journal-World

The white washers are the first product that McFarlane Aviation produced.

McFarlane had been replacing the washers for years as the mechanic at the little Vinland airport that he had owned and operated since 1979. It was frustrating to customers how often they had to be replaced. The solution was simple enough. The factory was using cheap plastic. McFarlane found a much higher-grade plastic and made the washers himself.

While simple, it was revolutionary. In the early 1980s, if you needed a replacement part for an airplane, you got it from the airplane manufacturer. McFarlane began to change that idea one part at a time. The major manufacturers didn’t necessarily like it, but the aviation public sure did. McFarlane said almost every item his company made ended up selling for about half the price demanded by the manufacturer.

“In some instances they were just totally nuts and we might charge 10% of what they were charging,” he said.

Today, McFarlane Aviation has a catalog about 2 inches thick, and it has developed about 3,000 of its own products, all of which are approved by the FAA and most of which are produced in small batches at the Vinland facility that is still located next door to a grass landing strip.

What has changed, though, is the attitude the big aviation manufacturers have towards McFarlane. Now, many of the manufacturers receive key parts from McFarlane. For example, the throttle cable and knob on all Cessna aircraft — the device that a pilot pushes or pulls to make the plane go faster or slower — are made by McFarlane in Vinland. Think of that: A piece of Vinland has probably seen every corner of the world, just thanks to that part alone.

McFarlane, the man, has seen a lot of the world too, one pilot at a time. The company travels to aviation shows, with the granddaddy in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, where more than half a million aviation enthusiasts gather each year. The company has a booth there, and McFarlane often staffs it. Employees last week told stories that if Dave is at the booth, you will know it because there will be a line of people nearby.

When asked about it, Dave almost shrugged it off as it being nothing more than people looking for a tip on aircraft maintenance from a fellow who had done it for a long time. While that is undoubtedly true, employees said there’s more to it than that.

Many, they say, want to meet the man who has helped them continue to own their own planes. By coming up with more affordable replacement parts, thousands of pilots can still afford to fly their own planes. And employees of the company say it is not lost on those pilots that there is a particular man who made that possible.

“They stand and wait to talk to this man because you are a legend,” Autumn Eckman, a former employee who worked with Dave for decades, said at his surprise awards ceremony. “All they wanted to do is just shake your hand and say thank you.”

photo by: Chad Lawhorn/Journal-World

A display board shows various products made by McFarlane Aviation.

•••

Dave didn’t leave the friendly confines of the service station to build a plastic washer, though. Instead, he left to fly — not necessarily high, but rather, really close to the ground.

At 18 years old, he was an aviation sprayer, or a crop duster, as they are more casually called. His first contract was for the federal government spraying fire ants in the delta region of Mississippi. Those pesky ants were coming in on cargo ships, and the government wanted to kill them before they advanced north.

“It was high flying,” he said.

How high? Just above the treetops.

That, of course, creates a corollary question: What’s considered low flying? Just above the cotton bolls.

McFarlane spent many a year spraying cotton fields in the South. He said those runs involved your wheels being just above the ground, and often a row of trees at the end of the field getting ever closer.

“You are only allowed one mistake,” McFarlane said.

McFarlane said the work was hard on multiple levels. It was hot, it was dusty, but most of it all, it was tiring. Hours were often long because the chemicals had to be sprayed at specific points in the season, and spraying was only possible on days when the wind was just right. When the calendar and the conditions matched, you sprayed for a long time.

“Fatigue was one of the big risk factors you always had to keep fighting,” he said.

McFarlane, though, was in the spraying business for 25 years, including many years after he moved his family to Douglas County to take over ownership of the then-struggling Vinland airport.

Eventually he quit the spraying business to focus on the parts-making business. He loved the adrenaline and the flying skill required in the spraying business, but he mostly loved that he was helping a farmer. In a slightly different way, he said the parts business gave him a similar feeling. Every time the company developed a new part, he felt he was being helpful to an entire industry.

The days of dusty farm fields and looming hedgerows, though, are never very far from McFarlane’s mind. The spraying business taught him how important precision and quality are in the world of aviation. He maintained his own plane throughout his spraying days, and the quality of that maintenance was critical for both dollars and safety. That’s a philosophy that the parts business has been built upon.

“Errors just can’t be tolerated in the aviation industry,” McFarlane said. “We make errors every day, but we have to catch them and correct them.”

•••

Come to find out, a business built on the philosophy of letting no error go unfixed can end up pretty successful.

When the Journal-World reported on the company in 2011, it had 38 employees. Since then, the company has undertaken three building expansions — each a multimillion-dollar project — and now has about 150 employees.

A case could be made that the most successful high-tech company in Douglas County is in Vinland, where company headquarters has a decent view of the antique tractor pull that happens each year on the other side of the county road.

There have been a multitude of reasons for the growth. Some are demographic, like the shortage of major airline pilots. The industry is ramping up training of entry-level pilots to get those numbers on the rise. Those small planes are bread-and-butter users of McFarlane parts.

Other reasons, though, could be described as high finance. McFarlane told the Journal-World he has sold a majority stake of the business to a private equity firm, Victor Sierra Aviation Holdings. That arrangement has been a best-of-both-worlds arrangement, thus far. The equity firm has provided the capital for McFarlane to expand both through new buildings and through acquisition of other parts makers. It also has allowed the company to keep its family nature. McFarlane still reports to work, and carries the title of founder, and multiple family members also continue to work at the Vinland headquarters.

It has been quite a journey, which should be no surprise for a man who likes to fly. But then, you realize what this journey didn’t have. This maker of technical aviation parts that must go through intense approval processes doesn’t have an engineering degree. He doesn’t have a design degree, either. In fact, he doesn’t have any college degree.

“It has all been self study,” he said.

It is impressive, but also creates the question of why? Why do it the hard way? For a kid from a small-town farming community (or lots of places, really), the answer of why he didn’t go to college often comes down to not being able to afford it.

That’s the case here, but maybe not in the way you expect. After all, there was service station money. Seriously. The brothers covered their expenses and then some. There were the flight lessons, there were the decent cars that they drove throughout high school, and more. As Dave says now, they made decent money.

The affordability problem didn’t have to do with money.

“I couldn’t afford the time,” he said.

McFarlane had big plans, and college would slow them down too much. So, he decided to “short-circuit” that part of the process.

Only a certain kind of man can afford to think that way. And, especially this way: “School was always easy for me, so it was easy to self study when I needed to.”

Only a confident man can afford to think that way. The type of confidence that a 16-year-old finds lording over a garage that he owns. For that matter, 15-year-olds can find it too. Dave’s brother went on to be a successful engineer.

Come to find out, two mechanically oriented brothers had been given a wonderful opportunity — an opportunity to discover confidence they would carry for the rest of their lives.

Perhaps it is not the greatest discovery a pair of brothers has ever made — McFarlane has a lapel pin that reminds us of another one — but it is a pretty good one in its own right.