Dillon

DAVIS — An Elkins native will be inducted into the West Virginia Aviation Hall of Fame by the West Virginia Airport Managers Association in Davis on July 31.

Captain Perry Dillon, a founding member of the Elkins Pilots Club, will be inducted posthumously during a special ceremony at the Canaan Valley Resort in Davis.

Dillon will be inducted alongside Thomas Cochran, director of the Raleigh County Memorial Airport in Beckley. The ceremony will begin at 5:30 p.m. on July 31.

Dillon was nominated for the Hall of Fame by Mary Alice and Stanley Ricottilli, the managers of the Elkins-Randolph County Regional Airport.

“We decided he probably had an interesting enough career, and the way he came up,” said longtime Elkins businessman Jay Wallace, also a member of the Elkins Pilots Club, who helped prepare Dillon’s nomination.

“Now, usually, you have to have a military background or have an aeronautical engineering background to work your way into the airlines. He literally did it the hard way.”

Dillon was born in 1937 in Parcoal in Webster County, with his family moving to Huttonsville when he was 5-years-old.

In 1944, Dillon’s stepfather took him to see the P-51 Mustang fighter planes that had been evacuated to Harper Field, later the Elkins-Randolph County Regional Airport, due to a hurricane. One of the P-51 pilots allowed a 7-year-old Dillon to sit in a plane and learn how it worked. Thus began a lifelong love of aircraft. 

He graduated from Tygarts Valley High School in 1955, with the yearbook’s Class Prophecy stating that “Perry Dillon likes sketching aircraft so well he is now Chief Aeronautical Engineer for the Dillon Aircraft Company.”

Dillon took his initial and recorded first flight in a J-3 Cub at Horns Flying School in Chagrin Falls, Ohio in 1956. He would go on to marry Rita Defibaugh in 1957.

Returning to Elkins in 1958, Dillon worked as a delivery route driver for Farm Fresh Dairy, supporting his family and working his way through flight training, with his work shift beginning at 3 a.m. and finishing at noon so he could pursue his aviation career in the afternoon. He would work as a delivery route driver until 1964.

Dillon received his Private Pilot certificate in 1960, his Commercial Flight rating in 1961, and his Certified Flight Instructor rating in January 1962.

After finishing crop dusting training in Merigold, Mississippi, Dillon returned to Elkins in May 1962 to help begin the Elkins Pilots Club as its first instructor.

In the Club’s first 12 months, Dillon solo trained 27 fledgling pilots, with a total of 100 students, including a French-Canadian student that he taught to fly in just three days, in training by 1964.

Dillon began working at Lake Central Airlines, now known as US Airways, at the Indianapolis International Airport in 1964.

His successful career as a pilot spanned more than 30 years, retiring from the airline as its fifth most senior captain in 1994. He logged nearly 23,000 hours of total time in aircraft ranging from the two-seat J-3 Cub to the Boeing 767, which seats 210 passengers. 

Dillon passed away at the age of 84 in Beverly in 2021.

To buy tickets for the West Virginia Aviation Hall of Fame ceremony on July 31, email info@wvama.org. To learn more about the West Virginia Aviation Hall of Fame, visit transportation.wv.gov/aeronautics.