Spring Lake Township resident reflects on lifetime of flying, sharing passion with family

Prior Lake American

The Coddington family knows all about flying.

Marty Coddington, a Spring Lake Township resident, grew up in an aviation family. When his second son asked him, Coddington taught him how to fly. Now, his grandson is a pilot as well.

The family was recently featured in Air Line Pilot Magazine, which had sent out requests to readers for stories of families just like the Coddingtons.

“There’s a number of families with multi-generations of people that are in the business,” Coddington said.

So, Coddington sent in his own family’s story, but the magazine misplaced it and it didn’t run with the other set of stories. After about a year, the magazine reached out to Coddington again — staff had misplaced the article but they wanted to still run it.

And it’s some story.

Coddington went into the Air Force after high school and was an air traffic controller before losing his job in 1981 as a result of the air traffic controller strikes. He then worked as a 911 operator for three years and then at the post office after that.

When he retired from the post office, he began to fly full-time for regional airlines.

“I’d handled airplanes since I was a child,” Coddington said. “My dad was in a flying club and I was allowed to control the airplane in the flying club every once in a while.”

After the G.I. Bill was renewed, Coddington got every kind of rating he could — private piloting in land planes, commercial piloting in land planes, instrument ratings for airplanes, piloting single-engine planes, piloting multi-engine planes, private piloting hot air balloons, commercially piloting hot air balloons and becoming an instructor as well.

There’s not a plane (or balloon) in the sky that Coddington can’t fly.

“I know a couple of guys with more ratings than I do, but it’s taken me 80 years to find that out,” Coddington said.

Coddington’s father worked for airlines in the 1940s. His son, Dean, was in the Navy. His grandson, Mitch, went to the University of North Dakota and went into the flying program. From his vantage point spanning generations of aviation, Coddington has been able to see how the airline industry has changed.

“The rules and procedures and stuff like that changed so fast that if a guy had gone into some sort of time warp back in the 1950s and all of a sudden woke up from a nap and walked into it today, he wouldn’t recognize it,” Coddington said. “Some things are the same but a lot of things aren’t.”

There are a few high points of his long career that Coddington remembers vividly. Some of them are speed records, of which he’s set three. Some were times that he helped someone get to where they needed to be — he stopped the plane for one woman so her sister could reach the flight and make it to their mother’s funeral in the morning.

“When you’re an airline pilot, you often don’t realize where people are going that are on your airplane,” Coddington said. “Sometimes, you’re lucky enough to find out they’re going somewhere really important and you’re the one that got them there.”

One time, Coddington talked another pilot out of the sky and safely into a field after she ran out of gas in the air, which earned him national attention and an award from the Federal Aviation Administration.

“I look back at my career with a lot of pride,” Coddington said. “I had an interesting life, it went very well, I never hurt nobody, never broke any airplanes. We have a joke in the business that if you retire and you don’t have a procedure named after you, you did a good job.”

Coddington was inducted into the Minnesota Aviation Hall of Fame in 2014. He hasn’t flown for a while, but he’s hoping to get back into it soon.

“You want to kind of sit down and cry when you think about all the years and money and experiences you had getting to where you got and then you don’t use it anymore,” Coddington said. “I don’t want to forget all those things. It was a life well spent I think, so I’d kind of like to renew that.”

CORRECTION: A previous version of this article said Marty Coddington was inducted into the Minnesota Aviation Hall of Fame in 2017. It was 2014. We regret the error.