While they were getting ready, other drivers and I would load an aircraft, usually a Lear 23 or 24, and within 10 minutes they were blasting off like the space shuttle. When I arrived, the dispatcher would fetch them, the pilots would stumble into the trailer, unshaved, wearing t-shirts and sandals, plot out their flight to Spirt of St Louis airport and file a flight plan.

A few pilots slept in bunks in one of the nearby T-hangars. I would drive to somewhere like Sterling Heights or Livonia, to some small shop, pick up a pallet or two of springs, and bring them to the freight circle. On a typical day a call would come from someone like Chrysler: they needed some door springs at their St Louis plant ASAP.

I worked as a driver and aircraft loader. Most of the business was from auto companies or suppliers. They would also dispatch truck drivers to pickup local freight. A couple of dispatchers in the trailer took orders for pickup or delivery by phone and assigned pilots to the job. I would enter the grounds through the gate at the end of French Road and drive past the DPD hangar and a set of T-hangars to get to the freight circle. They had hangar and office space in the old terminal building but their operations were run out of a trailer parked in an area called the freight circle, on the south side of the airport, west of French Road. I worked there for an air freight company, Executive Aviation, in the summer of '85.

Cemetery near detroit city airport