Credits

Much of the original layout and design for www.ekkt.org was done by Bob Mack, creator of www.flightsimtraining.com. For his biography, please see below.

Secondary design, data input and new pages (including the layout for the Galleries) were created by Melissa Wells. Melissa is a trained Librarian with schooling in reasearch collation and web site development. Leaving her job at Royal LePage's Canadian head office in the Web Development department, she is currently working freelance.

Gray Eagle did not refer to the color of his hair. It was the call sign assigned to him when he flew in the Navy. (Didn't you see the movie "Top Gun"?) His name is Bob Mack and when he graduated from the US Naval Academy he went immediately into flight training at Pensacola, Florida. After completing training there (including carrier landings), he was assigned to fly multi-engine patrol planes and had to complete a course of flight instruction at Hutchinson, Kansas. (Don't ask why the Navy had a base in Kansas - it must have been politics.) After he got his wings there, he spent the majority of his remaining flying time in the Navy as a Flight Instructor. He was eventually grounded for physical reasons and was transferred to the Polaris/Poseidon Missile Program at Cape Canaveral, Florida. During the next few years he was training submarine crews to launch ballistic missiles. And then, when he hung up his uniform after 14 years, it was to become a civilian employee of the Navy, working out of Washington, DC, but still in the same business of training SSBN submarine crews. During this time he flew his own Beechcraft Bonanza. (Obviously the FAA's physical standards aren't as hard to meet as the Navy's.)

As you probably know, the government doesn't pay very well, so, because he had two great kids to put through college, he regretfully left the Navy to become a businessman in Southern California. He had often flown into San Diego and loved it, so he knew there wasn't a better place to live and work.  His children are both happily married, one living in San Diego and the other in Virginia, and he was the proud grandfather of two wonderful boys.  He did semi-retire in San Diego where he ran a small computer consulting business for awhile and lived with a hound dog named Gus.  Bob moved to Virginia for a short time and then moved to Canada to be with his new wife.

He kept actively involved in aviation matters, on and off the internet, as much as he possibly could. Since he'd been in San Diego, he obtained both a sailplane and a seaplane rating just for the fun of it. He was also a member of the management team of the hottest, new Virtual Airline on the net, BlueSkies World Airways, where he ran the Aviation Academy  for a time, to try to teach computer simulator pilots how to fly them realistically.