Pat Epps, pioneering force in aviation, dies at 91

Pat Epps was ahead of his time when it came to running Epps Aviation. He took power naps long before researchers noted the benefits. He practiced hands-on management, walking around DeKalb-Peachtree Airport, talking face-to-face with his many employees and customers.

And he was an influencer, telephoning people and encouraging them to attend an event he considered worthwhile.

“He had an old-school style,” said his daughter, Marian Epps. He knew being “present and available was more powerful than emails or being behind a desk.”

Ernest Patrick Epps died at home in Atlanta on Nov. 14, surrounded by his family. He was 91, one of 10 children born in Athens to Onie Williams Epps and Ben Thomas Epps.

The first to fly — and build — an airplane in the state, Ben Epps is considered the father of aviation in Georgia.

Though her husband died in a plane crash in 1937, Onie Epps encouraged all of her children to learn to fly. Pat Epps’ older brother, Doug Epps, taught him, and he soloed in a Piper Cub before leaving for college at Georgia Tech.

There, he majored in mechanical engineering, pledged Beta Theta Pi fraternity and joined ROTC, leaving school with a commission as a second lieutenant. He married his first wife, Ann Hailey, shortly after graduation, and the couple moved to Seattle. She died in 2013.

Pat Epps worked for Boeing as a flight test engineer, then entered the U.S. Air Force, staying until 1963, when he moved to Huntsville, Alabama, to work for his brother, George Epps, at an engineering space company.

He and his brother became Mooney Aircraft dealers for Alabama and Georgia. In 1965, Pat, with brothers George and Charles, started Epps Air Service at DeKalb-Peachtree Airport.

Years later, he bought out his brothers and created “a full-service fixed-base operation,” Marian Epps said. With 21 acres, the company had eight hangers and 150 employees. It sold, fueled, chartered, stored and managed airplanes, she said.

At one time, Epps owned a flight school and a restaurant near the DeKalb-Peachtree Airport. In 2023, SAR Trilogy Management purchased Epps Aviation, renaming it Aero Center Epps Atlanta, one of several such centers around the country.

“Growing up, we knew that if you wanted to see Dad, you had to go to the airport,” Marian said. “That’s where all the action was. His hobby was the airport.”

Things ran smoothly because Epps “built a team he trusted to execute to his standards,” said longtime employee Megan Stewart. “He was proud of the business and that it could run without him.”

Granddaughter Hailey Tharp remembered lying on a dock as a child at Lake Burton at night with her cousins and listening to her grandfather recite Robert W. Service’s poem, “The Cremation of Sam McGee” from memory. Even with his round-the-clock tending to his business, Epps managed to attend most everything involving his grandchildren — recitals, performances and sporting events.

He is credited as one of the leaders in the recovery of a Lockheed P-38 F Lightning plane trapped under 264 feet of ice in Greenland, where it had been abandoned in the first year of America’s involvement in World War II.

Directed by the Greenland Expedition Society, which Epps and friend Richard Taylor formed in 1981, the recovery took years, as a team of aviation experts and engineers located the plane, designed equipment to reach it and removed it, piece by piece and then restored it.

“Mr. Epps wanted to do it because it sounded like a fun idea to do with his buddies,” said Stewart, a customer service representative with Aero Center Epps Atlanta. “It was a lot more involved that he ever anticipated, but he took on the challenge.”