".........," he said. Sixty-one years after he left his royal DC3 — his because he had delivered it to, and piloted it for, King Abdul Aziz — Joe Grant was speechless when he again saw the carefully restored and maintained aircraft in the aeronautical museum in Riyadh. His emotion was contagious; the animated chatter of the group of air force officers, WW2 veterans and his wife Marga dwindled into respectful silence as the very private reunion of man and machine took place.
Captain Joseph (“For goodness sake — Joe!”) Grant last flew the aircraft in 1947, two years after deivering it from Cairo via Jeddah to Riyadh. “At the time it was an interesting delivery job,” he said, “but I had no idea that it was the beginning of so much.” It was, however, from that single aircraft, a gift to King Abdul Aziz from US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, that the idea of mass air transport in the Kingdom and the modern commercial aircraft fleet that is now Saudi Arabian Airlines was born.
Some aspire to a remembered position in history; Joe is now 98 and “Working hard on 99 and I have a full schedule,” is disarmingly modest and straightforward about his spot in the history of the Kingdom. “I flew DC3’s all around the world. The war had begun to wind down and we had loads of pilots and I just lucked into it. I really don’t know why in the world I did; I never will.”
Now back, he was staggered by the changes he saw. “It’s like a fairy tale; to think, it was all desert when I was here, and to see it transformed...” Joe reminisced, tailing off into silence with the steady gaze of one looking across decades to memories of simpler times.
His story reads like a film script. The second eldest of 12 children in his family, he was born on a family farm in Florida and he remembers his early years as tough and moneyless. However, he had a hero. “My mother’s brother was one of the first to fly round the world,” said Joe, “I guess that had a profound effect on me. His plane is in the Smithsonian Institute.”
At 19 Joe left home and took odd jobs, one as an assistant mechanic in a garage servicing Stutz Bearcats — a modish and very expensive sports car. Significantly for Joe, the owner had an airplane. Later he found work as an airplane mechanic in Buffalo, New York, where he brought his younger brother Roy to work. Later Joe worked at the Glenn Martin Company in Baltimore and while there, he took courses in aeronautical engineering at the Maryland Institute.
