Carmine Mowbray

Remember when avgas was 68¢ a gallon? Carmine was just learning to fly in a 150-hp TriPacer, and wondered how to afford to keep flying. These four decades later, she still loves flying. “I’ll give up lattés, professional pedicures and even shoes to keep flying,” she says. So far, it hasn’t gotten to that point.

When she learned of the Recreational Aviation Foundation’s mission, she signed on, beginning by helping build the Ryan pilot shelter, and chopping sagebrush on Missouri Breaks airstrips with a pulaski.

She has written two works of historical fiction, one about the pilots who flew from Montana to Fairbanks delivering nearly 8,000 warplanes to the Soviets during WWII. Her book website is authormargomowbray.com. During summers she lives near Flathead Lake, and flies her Cessna 182 to her winter home in St. George, UT, “where it’s VFR almost every day.”