STONINGTON — Maine island airstrips are still notoriously rudimentary—think cow pasture or gravel road—but transportation by airplane today is at least considered routine. Islanders owe some gratitude for that improvement to Herb Jones, a World War II veteran, who was one of the earliest providers of air service to Maine islands.
Jones expanded a service that began in the late 1940s with Arthur Harjula, a flight instructor who had an airstrip in back of a once-landmark Thomaston eatery, Dave’s Restaurant.
Harjula (who died in 1992 at 84) flew a Piper J-3 Cub, the little plane able to take one passenger at a time. He provided service to Maine’s most remote, year-round inhabited island, Matinicus, where both flight and boat access were limited in schedule, weather-dependent and expensive.
“I flew into Thomaston one day,” Jones recalled, “and he said he wanted to retire, and he wanted to know if I was interested in flying out to the islands. So I rented his airstrip.”
It was the early 1970s. Jones had received his pilot training, 30 years previously, from the best teacher in the world—the U.S. Air Force.
“I was a flyer in the war,” he said. “I went through cadet training and graduated from Williams Field in Arizona,” the leading pilot training facility during World War II.
Jones served with the Air Transport Command, a key support operation responsible for ferrying aircraft domestically and abroad, maintaining air routes and facilities outside the U.S., and transporting personnel and materiel. He flew two types of transport aircraft, the Curtiss C-46 Commando and the Douglas C-47 Skytrain. Among his missions, he flew twice from Burma to China over “The Hump,” a portion of the Himalayas. The missions were notoriously dangerous, due to violent weather and high mountain terrain, poorly equipped airfields, huge cargo loads and lack of navigation aids.
“Our main problem was the weather and not having anything to work with,” he said. “As far as navigational equipment, we had an ADF,” an automatic direction finder, one of the older types of radio navigation. “These light airplanes today have more equipment in them than those heavier ones did then,” Jones said.
“I flew Burma to China in 1945, so I was there when the war ended—and came home on a ship,” he recalled.
After the war, he returned to his hometown of Stonington (“I was born at my grandmother’s house, I believe”) and worked at a local boatyard, Billings Marine. Jones recalls the yard was building 62-foot boats at the time.
“I was there only a short time,” he said. “After that, I tried a little fishing—spotting herring and things like that.”
In the 1950s, he built a non-commercial airport in Stonington, “and tried to make a little something out of that.”
Land was pretty cheap at the time, so his uncle bought a piece of unused property and Jones constructed a 1,600-foot runway.
“It was manual labor on my part, drilling out ledges, and my uncle would help me blow them out of there,” he said. “A lot of granite on this island, a lot of hard work.”
Eventually, he gave the airport to the town. (It’s still one runway, no fuel or lights, and maintained mainly by donations and volunteer labor.)
Upon taking over Harjula’s business, Jones named it the Stonington Flying Service and operated about eight years at the original strip in Thomaston. Then he moved the service and his family to Owls Head, staying nine years.
Jones expanded the capability of the service’s aircraft.
“I flew Cessnas mostly, the Cessna 182, the old 336 Skymasters, the 185 and the 206,” known as Skywagons, he said. “I could take up to five passengers, depending on the type of aircraft. Only three passengers in the 182s. That was the major aircraft.”
On top of the Matinicus run, Jones added Vinalhaven and North Haven, carrying mail, passengers and freight.
“I was the first one to use larger aircraft out there. We flew on a daily basis—every day that was flyable. We couldn’t fly in heavy fog or storms.”
The service, said Jones, helped folks maintain a way of life. For that, Matinicus probably depended on him the most, he says. The community of about 75 year-round residents, augmented to 100 in the summer, 20 miles off the coast, is otherwise dependent on a limited ferry schedule and a 2 ½-hour passage. North Haven and Vinalhaven ferries take more than an hour.
Jones retired in 1986 and moved with his wife Colleen back to Stonington. His son Charlie took over for a while, renaming the business Penobscot Island Air. After several subsequent owners, it is now in the hands of Kevin Waters.
Jones, who will be 90 in April, has spent his retirement mainly on home-improvement projects and enjoying his large family. He and Colleen have 12 children, “quite a few” grandchildren “and great-grandchildren and even a great-great-grandchild.”
The service Harjula started and which Jones expanded improved island life, especially for Matinicus, he modestly agreed.
“They didn’t have too much of a ferry service. If there were an emergency, I could fly patients in to get them to the hospital,” he said.