Perry H. Young Jr.

Perry Henry Young Jr. was born on the twelfth of March 1919 at Orangeburg, South Carolina, the son of Perry Henry Young Sr. — a teacher at the Claflin College of Orangeburg — and Maud Young, a homemaker. The family moved to Oberlin, Ohio in 1923 when his father took a position at the Black Federation of Methodist Churches headquarters of Oberlin.

He was placed at six at the Oberlin public schools and at the Oberlin College for the bachelor’s in fine arts, completing the degree in 1942. He took flight instruction at the Oberlin College Civilian Pilot Training Program at the closing months of 1941, completing the federal pilot’s licence in 1942.

He was admitted in 1942 to the United States Army Air Forces and assigned to the Tuskegee Army Air Field for advanced flight instruction. He completed the Tuskegee instructor course in 1943 and was retained as a flight instructor at Tuskegee through the closing year of the war, ascending to chief flight instructor of the basic flight school in 1944. He trained over a hundred and forty Tuskegee Airmen primary cadets across his Tuskegee tenure.

He was not deployed overseas across the active war period — the Army Air Forces declined to deploy the senior Tuskegee instructor corps because of their training value to the continuing pipeline.

He took employment at the close of the war at the Coast Guard helicopter operation as a helicopter pilot — among the first Black helicopter pilots of the United States — and at Los Angeles Airways in the closing years of the 1940s as a helicopter pilot and flight instructor.

He was hired on the seventeenth of February 1957 by New York Airways — the principal helicopter-passenger-shuttle operator of the New York City metropolitan area, operating the inter-airport shuttle between LaGuardia Airport, Idlewild Airport (subsequently JFK), and the Manhattan Heliport at the Pan Am Building — as a Sikorsky S-58 helicopter pilot. The hire was the first hiring of a Black pilot by a regularly scheduled American passenger airline in the history of the period.

He served New York Airways as a helicopter pilot for the following twenty-two years until the airline’s bankruptcy in 1979 — through the closing decade of the New York City helicopter-shuttle era. He retired from New York Airways at the airline’s shutdown on the eighteenth of May 1979 having accumulated over twenty-two thousand hours of helicopter flight time.

He taught helicopter pilotage and aeronautics at the State University of New York at Farmingdale from 1980 until 1990.

He died at Garden City, New York on the seventeenth of November 1998 of complications of a heart attack, at seventy-nine.

He is honored here as the first Black pilot at a scheduled American passenger airline.