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Wall of Honor Level:
Air and Space Friend

Honored by:

Wilmot G. Rhodes’ aviation career included 8,400 military and civilian flight hours over a 51-years period, with pilot ratings of Private, Commercial, Instrument, Multi-engine CPTP Aerobatic Check Pilot, FAA Flight Examiner and Civil Air Patrol Search and Rescue Pilot.
During WWII, he was a Flight Commander at the U.S. Army’s Liaison Pilot School before a special assignment with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) to help develop flight operation techniques for the Brodie System – launching and retrieving light aircraft on a horizontal cableway suspended on the side of LST ships during the planned invasion of Japan. (See L-5 aircraft with Brodie System hook now hanging on display at NASM’s Udvar-Hazy Center.) After developing Brodie System flying techniques on LST 776 at San Diego, he returned to Ft. Sill’s Liaison Pilot School and trained flight instructors on the Brodie System, resulting in over 100 Army liaison pilots being trained on the Brodie System for the planned invasion of Japan. Rhodes then took a Brodie land rig to an RAF base at Jessore, India to demonstrate it to the Combined U.S.-British CBI Headquarters to determine if the land rig could be useful to Allied combat forces in Burma. No such use resulted.
Following WWII, with an MBA degree, Rhodes was faculty member from 1946 to 1949 at Auburn University and the University of Oklahoma also managing the flight school at each institution.
During 1951-1953, Rhodes served as an U.S. Air Force Reserve Captain in the Office of the Secretary of the Air Force – Pentagon.
From 1958 to 1969, Rhodes was the resident Washington Representative for Cessna Aircraft Company, handling aerospace marketing to U.S. Government offices and certain embassies. From 1973 to 1984, he served a similar Washington, D.C. assignment with the Boeing Company, handling transport aircraft programs that included being Boeing’s liaison representative to the White House, the Presidential Pilot’s Office, and numerous Pentagon offices on the development of the two Boeing 747s now in White House service.
Following retirement in 1984, Rhodes served in the Civil Air Patrol in Georgia and Kansas as a Search and Rescue Pilot.