Like the moment he was flying 98 passengers on a four engine triple-tail Constellation in 1960 from Tokyo to Wake Island then on to Honolulu and San Fransisco. They were beyond the point of no return when one engine quit. Capt. Snowden radioed for help and the Air Sea Rescue service sent a plane to intercept the Constellation in case it had to land in water. Stewardesses helped passengers into life vests called Mae Wests and tried to keep everybody calm. The rescue plane flew alongside them until they were about two hours off Wake. Then the rescuers had a problem themselves. An engine had quit. They had to fall back.

"We kept flying on three engines," Bob recalls. "Then another half hour and another engine quit. We were losing altitude. It was scary. Well, we managed to slide in on a wing and a prayer into Wake." He shook his head, "It was a moment of terror."

Another moment of terror occurred when his plane, a Douglas DC-4, came within a hair’s breath of a mid-air collision over Germany. He was flying displaced persons from Munich to the United States at the end of World War II. Bob had left the co-pilot to go to the rear of the plane for a minute when suddenly the plane rocked violently. He ran back to the cockpit to see exhaust gases spray across the windshield. A military jet fighter out of Wiesbaden had come within feet of smashing into their DC-4. "I was shaking, believe me," he said.

Otherwise, Cap’n Bob (as he’s called around Cutchogue) said piloting a plane around the world becomes routine.

Celebrating his 90th birthday on Christmas Day, Robert E. Snowden Jr. can remember the thrill of watching early "barnstormers" do aerial stunts at Roosevelt Field, the same field from which Charles Lindbergh took off to make his historic nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927. Young Bob wasn’t at the field that morning. His mother insisted 14-year old boys belonged in school.

But the boy was still determined to become a pilot. He sold programs for the air shows and cleaned out the barns for the fliers. By age 15 he was flying one the first double-winged biplanes, a Swallow with a Curtis engine. At 16 he had his pilot’s license.

His mother feared that he would become just another mechanic, a "grease monkey." She directed his attention toward college and a degree in aeronautical engineering. Then, when a family friend, an executive with Brooklyn Union Gas Co., suggested he might have a job with the company, she persuaded young Bob to switch his major to mechanical engineering.. A job in those Depression days was a powerful motivator. He switched and got the job, staying with the gas company about five years while continuing flying lessons whenever he could.

By this time he had met and wooed one of the most popular girls in Garden City, Marjorie Burkhard, who worked in a New York City bank. They were married in 1938.

With the outbreak of war, Bob was given a commission in the Navy and assigned to teach flying. Later he advanced to the Naval Air Transport Service. This was his education in the airline flying, he says.

In the den of Bob’s home in Cutchougue he has mounted on the wall a glass case containing several sets of wings: one from his first flight instructor, a World War I pilot, one from the Navy and others from various airlines for which he flew: Seaboard and Western, Seaboard World and Luxembourg, once partially owned by Seaboard World.

Over the years he’s helped make aviation history. Besides having flown thousands of times across the Atlantic, he participated in the Berlin Air Lift in 1948 and 1949, bringing food, coal and other supplies to the beleaguered people of Berlin under Russian blockade. Later he flew in the Dewline early warning system that the United States set up around the Artic Circle to protect against a possible Russian missile assault during the Cold War. At one time he was president of Seaboard Pilots Association Retirees and later he helped organize the Early Fliers Club. He instructed at Mattituck Airport, a post he kept f nearly 30 years.

Although Bob has cut back on his activities he still maintains his keen interest in aviation.

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© 2004 The Long Island Early Fliers Club, P.O. Box 221, Bethpage, NY 11714-0221 • info@longislandearlyfliers.org