FAA honors Vegas pilot who’s done it all

Count Guido Roberto Deiro has racked up a lot of aviation feats during the decades he's been a commercial pilot.

From flying reclusive Las Vegas billionaire Howard Hughes on numerous adventures, to taking one of the first remote-controlled Predator aircraft for a spin, to flying in air races and becoming the first manager of the North Las Vegas Airport, he's done about everything a person with pilot wings can do.

Thursday night at the same airport — the former Sky Haven Airport and North Las Vegas Air Terminal that he named and put on the radar — he notched another flight achievement to his belt.

The Federal Aviation Administration honored him with The Wright Brothers Master Pilot Award for "practicing and promoting safe aircraft operations for 50 consecutive years."

According to the Department of Transportation website, it "is the most prestigious award the FAA issues" to certified pilots.

"It makes me feel like the last man standing. I look around and I think of all my fellow aviators who have made contributions and gone west. It's sobering," he said prior to receiving it at the FAA Safety Team meeting.

"I'm honored and humbled," said Deiro, 77, of Las Vegas. "Most pilots don't last 50 years. What made my career different is the variety of operations and aircraft I flew, and the different experiences I had. I flew all over the world."

He has flown single-engine and multi-engine fixed-wing planes, helicopters and seaplanes. About the only thing he hasn't piloted is a hot air balloon.

His other accomplishments include spearheading the effort that gave Las Vegas an aviation division for its police department. He was also the first local squadron commander of the Civil Air Patrol. "It's just that I was there and had the skills to do it," he said.

Born in Reno as the son of vaudeville star Count Guido Pietro Deiro, he graduated from Las Vegas High School in 1955 and later worked as a casino dealer to pay for flight lessons. His aviation career came to full bloom in 1967 when he became director of aviation facilities for Hughes Tool Co., and worked directly for "Mr. Hughes," as he called him, who bought North Las Vegas Air Terminal.

"He had a high-pitched, very distinctive voice," he said about Hughes, who was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame in 1973.

"He would get mad if I didn't do things right. He had a terrible temper. Swore like a sailor," Deiro said. "Hughes' love was airplanes and women."

One of Deiro's hobbies was flying half-scale, remote-controlled airplanes.

He also belongs to a secretive post-World War I vintage club, the Quiet Birdmen, which had a "wing ding" gathering in the late-1990s when defense contractor General Atomics was testing its forerunner of remote-controlled Predator aircraft at Indian Springs Airfield, now Creech Air Force Base, 45 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

"There were 60 of us on these two buses and they take us out there as part of our wing ding," he said. "This colonel says, 'We've got one ticket.' The lucky guy gets to fly this little push-pull thing, the UAV thing. I didn't win it but somebody I knew did. So I gave him a hundred bucks and I got to go fly it."

Contact Keith Rogers at krogers@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0308. Find him on Twitter: @KeithRogers2.