By MAUREEN BYRNE AHERN
Published December 14, 2003
GULFPORT - John Wayne DeLamater loved being a pilot.
After flying helicopters for the Army, he turned the passion into a career. As a corporate pilot, he flew a seaplane for French explorer Jacques Cousteau during an expedition on the Nile River in Egypt.
But most of his flying was more routine, shuttling corporate clients to various destinations.
When DeLamater, 57, left his Gulfport home Tuesday to fly to Alabama for an overnight trip, his wife, Kathryn, expected him to arrive home Wednesday about the same time she did.
Instead, she got a phone call. Her husband of 23 years - the avid sailer, the great cook and the man who could fix anything - had died.
DeLamater was killed Wednesday afternoon when the twin-engine Cessna he was piloting crashed minutes after taking off from Birmingham International Airport in Alabama. The plane was headed for Venice. A passenger, Melia Warrington, 44, of Osprey, also died in the crash.
Officials did not release DeLamater's name to the media until Friday, when dental records confirmed that he was the pilot.
"It seems very unreal," Mrs. DeLamater, 55, said Saturday as she sat at her dining room table with her twin sons, Dana and Royal Brown, 33, and her daughter-in-law, Stormy Brown, 33. Her stepson, John "Jack" Wayne DeLamater Jr., 39, also was visiting from Atlanta.
Family and friends are helping her deal with the shock of losing her husband. She said she's staying busy making arrangements for a memorial service Wednesday and talking with friends and neighbors who are stopping by to give their condolences. She said the hard part will be when life returns to normal.
Mrs. DeLamater said that her husband was seriously injured as a passenger in a small plane crash in the early 1990s, but that he had never had an accident as a pilot.
Witnesses reported hearing a loud whining noise from the plane as it spiraled out of control, barely missing businesses and apartment buildings before landing in a creek.
Terry Harbarger, deputy fire chief for Vestavia Hills, Ala., told the Birmingham News that he was surprised the plane didn't hit any of the surrounding buildings.
"It's amazing," he said. "It fell right between them."
Mrs. Warrington's husband's company, Warrington Development Corp., owned the plane. Joseph Fawal, attorney for Warrington Development, said Melia Warrington had been visiting her sick mother in Alabaster, Ala. Her husband, Ed, had sent the company plane to pick her up and bring her back to Florida, Fawal said.
The cause of the crash remains under investigation.
After living in Atlanta most of their lives and recently living on a sailboat for four years, the DeLamaters bought a two-bedroom house in Gulfport in May 2002. They were settling down in the quiet neighborhood and keeping their 40-foot, 1959 sailboat, Jeremiah II, in a slip at Gulfport Municipal Marina. They were members of the Boca Ciega Yacht Club, where DeLamater fixed the women's bathrooms fixtures in June.
"He was working pretty well on that grandparent thing, too," Stormy Brown said.
