Mel Holmes

Mel Holmes, President of Grey Eagle Airlines, said: ,I would like to thank all of you for making this happen.

Mel Holmes, CEO of Grey Eagle Aviation and Grey Eagle Flight Academy based at Carlsbad's Palomar Airport, relaxes in a passenger seat of the company's new 9-seat, turbo propped Caravan airplane
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Boredom drove him to start up Marianas Airlines, but in 2002, the economies of Japan and Korea softened and the tourists stopped their island hopping, so Holmes decided to move home.

"I renamed it Grey Eagle Aviation because nobody here has any idea what the Marianas are," Holmes said.

Next on the list of things to do was open a flight school, which he did at McClellan-Palomar Airport under the name Grey Eagle Academy.There's a wall inside with photographs of the 75 or so of Grey Eagle's students who have soloed ---- progressed to the point that they made a cross-country flight alone.

Training pilots isn't anything new to Holmes.The Navy made him do it.

He found himself in the Navy in the early years of the Vietnam War because the Navy was his ticket out of the farm country of eastern Oregon.

"I worked in the wheat fields as a combine driver when I was a kid, but I had terrible allergies.My eyes would swell shut, but it was the only way a young man could make any money in La Grande," Holmes said.

"I was going to be a teacher or a coach if I stayed there," he said, so he took a chance and applied for the Navy's pilot training program.

The combat kill ratio ---- the number of planes the enemy shoots down vs. the number the U.S. shoots down ---- for Navy pilots in the skies over Vietnam at that time was 1-to-1.After three deployments to Vietnam, Holmes became one of five experienced F-4 jockeys chosen by the Navy to reinvent the process of teaching combat pilots how to fly and fight at the same time.

"We wrote the manuals and designed the program," as he tells it."We were kind-of given our head to come up with it."

What they came up with needed a name, so the Navy called it Top Gun."I didn't like the name," Holmes said, "but it stuck."

Most of what Grey Eagle does today is considerably more laid back than what Top Gun teaches.Its airplanes tend to be single-engine Cessnas.There's a Piper twin.The biggest plane is a turbine-powered Cessna Caravan, a nine-seater available for charter.

Holmes still flies, just not as much as he used to."I get about 5 hours a year, I think," he said.

"I'm uncomfortable in these little airplanes when I get them in landing configuration," he said.

Mel Holmes, President of Grey Eagle Airlines, said: "I would like to thank all of you for making this happen.

The service was primarily initiated by Grey Eagle Aviation President Mel Holmes and San Felipe Developer's Association President Armando Ramos, who owns the Marina Resort & Spa in San Felipe.
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"We expect a return on our money, that's automatic," Holmes said.

Grey Eagle was started by Mel Holmes, one of the Navy's Top Gun School founders and a retired commercial 747 pilot.Grey Eagle Air Charters specializes in flying to Mexican coastal cities."We've been flying to Baja for years and know this territory like the back of our hands," says Holmes."It was a natural next step to provide regularly scheduled flights to San Felipe.It's an area that offers something for everybody, and it's less than two hours away as the Grey Eagle flies."

Holmes is dedicating his new Cessna Caravan for use in the cross-border travel.