Richard Snelson was halfway through his teen years when he had the chance to take a  plane ride over the Missouri River outside Wainwright.

The love affair with aviation lasted a lifetime.

Snelson was long retired when we met to talk about his career as an engineer for the Gemini space project in St. Louis. His animated storytelling told me all I needed to know about his affection for flying and building airplanes. His wife Roxanne was literally along for the ride—as a support person for his career and passenger in the planes he flew and built. She has her share of stories, too.

In Prairie Flyers of Central Illinois: A Century of Aviation in America’s Heartland, Snelson shares his story of constructing the EAA Thorp T-18 at his home in central Illinois. To say the project took years of commitment is an understatement.

From our interviews, it was clear that the people who love to fly and work around planes view the world with a slightly larger lens than the rest of us. Where we look up to see the sky, their field of vision perpetually includes the sky. Richard Snelson is one of those people.