RAF FEATURED SUPPORTER: DON SEELYE

Recreational pilots have a very special place to visit thanks to some dedicated Michigan pilots including Don Seelye. These folks understood the recreational value of North Fox Island in Lake Michigan, just 27 nm from Charlevoix. “We used to fly out there regularly with our family and friends and do some maintenance,” Don says. “It was privately owned, and our pay was the use of the island. We were able to enjoy the Tom Sawyer thing,” he says. 

Don was raised near Flint, MI. His father was an automotive engineer. Don left college and the restraint of a desk, preferring the outdoors and doing his own engineering, which led to a successful career manufacturing electronic controls for environmental research. His clients included JPL and Generac. His company patented a special controller. “We were told it was the first controller to survive the Antarctic winter.”

Don never visited the frozen continent, preferring to explore Lake Michigan for shipwrecks. He bought a Cessna 120 and learned to fly. He’d fly over the lake, spotting telltale indications of something salvageable beneath the surface for his partner, who made furniture from legally salvaged wood. They would take their tugboat over the site and dive to the wreck. The best find, Don explains, was a three-masted schooner that had sunk over a hundred years before. It yielded beautifully preserved white oak.

For vacations, Don would fly with his wife Carol and three small kids in the two-seat Cessna. “Once we flew to Mackinac Island. I signed in as ‘C-120 with five onboard’. I kinda expected an official phone call, but it never came,” he mused.

Now, Don and his wife love flying the Lake Amphibian they bought in 1971. It has taken them over a good chunk of North America, from Key West to near Hudson Bay, he says, “We like to find remote lakes and camp. We find a somewhat sandy shoreline to beach the plane; maybe catch a big walleye.”

In 2009, Don saw an RAF story in a flying magazine and called John McKenna, asking to get involved. “The McKennas came to Michigan and met us that July, and we met with Michigan Aeronautics. More RAF volunteers came in and joined us for local meetings with the DNR in Lansing. We finally pushed and pushed and got North Fox open,” he says.