A lifetime of flying: Moses Lake man reflects on a 64-year career in the sky

MOSES LAKE — Daryl Jackson has been flying almost his entire life.

“I’ve been at this since I was 15,” said Jackson, 79, sitting in the office of the business he used to own with his son Darrin, Jackson Flight Center, in the Moses Lake Municipal Airport. “In fact, I soloed before I was 16, which is not supposed to happen.”

Jackson said the flight instructor in Sunnyside, where he grew up in the 1950s, asked him for his driver’s license as he was taking the exam for his pilot’s license.

“I told him I don’t have it, so he said, ‘Bring it tomorrow.’ And I told him, ‘No, I mean I don’t have it,’” he said.

Despite that, he got his pilot’s license, and crafted for himself a long career of flying — as a crop duster, flight engineer in the U.S. Air Force, mechanic, flight instructor and now as a designated pilot examiner for the Federal Aviation Administration, testing and certifying other pilots.

“I never really stopped flying,” he said. “I’ve done it all my life.”

In fact, Jackson said he’s flown about 40,000 hours “that they’re counting,” which is roughly four and a half years in the air.

It’s busy work, largely because there are so many young people learning to be pilots. In fact, Jackson spent part of his Monday out at Big Bend Community College supervising check flights of several flight school students, watching how they fly and grading them. And then filling out paperwork. But it’s all part of the process of becoming a pilot, before advancing up the FAA’s various grades of licensed pilots.

“I will get a call from an individual, or from an organization, a college or a flight school, that they have somebody ready for a check ride,” he said. “I’m booked clear into the middle of April.”

It also means he travels a lot, Jackson said. He tried to keep his FAA work restricted to the Pacific Northwest, and he said he conducts a lot of exams for Rainier Flight Service in Renton, which is teaching a lot of people in their 20s, and has a special process to train pilots for Seattle-based Horizon Air, the regional airline of Alaska Air Group.

“Horizon is on a big hiring kick right now, and I know four people I rode with who are going to Horizon,” he said.

And that’s one of the things Jackson said he appreciates about being both a flying instructor and an FAA-certified examiner — knowing he has contributed to an industry he loves, and in his travels he can regularly meet people he’s trained or certified.

“I trained this young man,” Jackson said as he pointed to a photo on the wall of himself with Capt. Kevin Rowan, a Southwest Airlines pilot, from 2017. “Well, he’s 65 in the photo, but that’s young as far as I’m concerned. I trained him on his very first flight, and I had the opportunity to ride in the cockpit with him on his very last flight as a Southwest Airlines pilot before he retired.”

“It was kinda fun to see that happen,” he said.

Jackson said Moses Lake, which has been home since he and his family moved in the late 1960s, when he left active duty service in the U.S. Air Force, has been very good to him and his family. It’s why he’s serving on the Moses Lake City Council, and had a stint as the city’s mayor in the 1990s.

“If you live here, you need to give something back to where you live,” he said. “We tried to make sure we did that.”

However, he turns 80 this year, and he said he will retire once his current FAA designated pilot examiner license expires at the end of March 2022.

After that, he plans to spend some time enjoying his retirement at a place he owns not far from Republic.

Before he can retire, however, Jackson said he’s training his replacement at his FAA examiner’s job — a 26-year-old female pilot who he said was selected by the Hawaii Air National Guard to learn to fly F-35 fighter jets.

“If you find good people, help them along,” he said. “We’re trying to fill in with younger folks. These younger guys need to be doing this.”

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached at [email protected].