After spending 10 years in Hollywood as a struggling writer and director, (hey, I have a few credits...including one movie that got a national release!) a production company based in Austin, Texas hired me to get a lavish science fiction film financed and produced in Texas. My wife and I spent a year in Austin and fell in love with the place. By accident, I also fell in love with flying and began piloting and reporting from a radio traffic helicopter, then later a television news helicopter. In the mornings, after the early morning patrol, I would have coffee with other pilots who had just arrived or were waiting to depart and they would swap stories from their early flying years and share laments of their broken marriages and relationships.  Over time I began to wonder why my own marriage was so solid?  It was because while I was a full time pilot, I spent most nights in my own bed - I was almost never away from home and hearth.  Out of the stories shared with me over morning coffee come the true major events that drive the action in RED BARON BLUES.

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RED BARON BLUES takes place in the 1980's, a period of transition for corporate aviation - female pilots were just beginning to break into the traditional "man's job" of being a pilot.

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Early on, I met a young female pilot (dressed like a cheerleader) that was working as a "ramp hostess" (parking aircraft and hustling water and ice to the flight crews) while she tried to build flight time in order to get a real pilot's job.  By chance I saw her again 10 years later, and had to smile...she was now Captain of a large Gulfstream corporate jet.  From humble beginnings, she had achieved her dream, but when I asked her if she was still with her long time boyfriend (another pilot), she admitted that their intense love affair had not survived.  While RED BARON BLUES is not her actual story, she is the inspiration behind it.