Boats Planes & People Autobiographical Writings

John Charlton was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1919. He moved to Ft. Lauderdale with his family as a small child, and spent many joyful hours building tin boats and sailing small boats on the inland waterways and off the coast. In his teenage years he was trained as surveyor working for his father, who surveyed the inland waterway from Martin County south through Dade County. John served as a trainer of pilots in Buckingham, Florida, and Major 782 bomb squadron in Italy in WW II. Following the war he built a sailboat and cruised the Bahamas on vacations throughout his 30 year career as pilot for National Airlines. In later life his greatest passion was teaching people to fly single engine tail wheel airplanes. He died of congestive heart failure at the age of 95 on September 4, 2014.