Photo courtesy Archives of the Big Bend, Bryan Wildenthal Memorial Library, Sul Ross State
University, Alpine, Texas.
John O. Casparis in his cockpit, preparing to hunt eagles.
form an Eagle Club to support
his activities. Members put in
$60 a year for every 2,000
sheep they owned. Between
May 1944 and March 1945
Casparis killed 806 eagles, 161
coyotes, four bobcats, two panthers
and a bear for the Eagle
Club, which paid him $5,739
that year. He told the Alpine
Avalanche that he killed most of
the eagles at below 500 feet, flying
at 120 miles per hour with
no hands. The tricky part, he
said, was that he had to get
above them, dive down on
them, pull the trigger and then
put down his shotgun and pull
out of the dive before hitting
the ground.
Casparis continued his
eagle-hunting business through
the 1950s and was written up
in a number of national magazines.
By 1960 he had killed
more than 10,000 eagles and
had crashed four times, suffering
severe burns. He also ran a
charter service from Starns
Field. Helmut Abt, a McDonald
Observatory astronomer, re -
called retaining Casparis to fly
him and a colleague to southern
Arizona to examine the site
of Kitt Peak Observatory from
the air. They got back to Alpine
after dark, and Abt claims that
Casparis circled over the town
turning his engine on and off
to alert someone to drive out to
the airport and turn the landing
strip lights on. When
Casparis died in 1984 the
name of the airport was
changed to honor him.
Alpine did not get on the
commercial air service map
until 1946, when Trans-Texas
Airways initiated a route from
Fort Stockton to Pecos, Alpine,
Marfa and El Paso, with connections
eastward to Austin
and San Antonio. TTA’s 26-
passenger, twin-engine DC-3s
did not utilize Starrns Field but
landed and took off from the
former Marfa Army Air Field
on U.S. 90 between Marfa and
Alpine; their timetables de -
scribed the stop as Alpine-
Marfa. The flights over the Big
Bend were famously bumpy (as
Cal Rodgers had discovered in
1911), and on one memorable
occasion a technician inadvertently
filled a tank designed to
hold water for the plane’s
steam heating system with carbon
tetrachloride. When the
heat was turned on over the Big
Bend the passengers were nearly
asphyxiated. The pilot and
the co-pilot were able to open
the cockpit windows and gulp
fresh air, but the passengers and
the stewardess had to be rushed
to the Fort Stockton hospital to
be revived.
The Trans-Texas stewardesses
on the Big Bend route
were dressed in costumes that
were a departure from the
semi-military uniforms of most
stewardesses of that period.
They wore long Western skirts,
silk blouses, bolero jackets, bandannas,
Navy blue Western
hats and cowboy boots. Service
was in keeping with the informality
of the Big Bend; there
are stories about planes turning
around in mid-flight and
returning to Alpine-Marfa to
deliver items accidentally left
on board by passengers and
about planes waiting at the airport
for passengers who had
trouble getting away from their
remote ranches on time.
Unfortunately the Trans-
Texas Big Bend flights never
carried enough passengers to
be profitable – six passengers
were considered a good load –
and in 1960 Trans-Texas terminated
the route. Since then
several small airlines have
attempted to provide scheduled
passenger service to Alpine.
The longest-lived was Lone
Star Airlines, which ferried
travelers from Alpine to the
Dallas-Fort Worth airport
between 1992 and 1995. Dallas
Express Airways, Solar Air -
ways and Big Bend Airways
have also tried to make a go of
it. All found that there were
simply not enough passengers
to keep them in business.
Today the Alpine-Casparis
Municipal Airport is a busy
place. According to airport
director Johnny Galvan, about
six private planes a day take off
and land on the airport’s two
runways, including the daily
UPS delivery plane that brings
packages for the entire Big
Bend. Department of Public
Safety and Customs and
Border Protection helicopters
are also based there, as well as a
Medevac helicopter and, in fire
season, the big twin-rotor helicopters
that dump water on
wildfires. On Saturday, Oct.
15, the runways will be crowded
with airborne ghosts from
the past.
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Alpine, TX 79830 Fax (432) 837-5516
Cenizo
Fourth Quarter 2011
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