On Friday, which marked the 118th anniversary of Wilbur and Orville Wright's first flight in Kitty Hawk, Elman reflected on a lifetime in aviation that started in the Big Apple as the son of a national radio host, and one that has been anything but ordinary.Įlman says his earliest memories as a child are seeing the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons pass by the window of the Manhattan home he began his life in before moving with his family to New Jersey as a small child.Įlman was only 4 years old when he fell in love with airplanes, tracing the fascination to interactions with aviation guests on his father Dave Elman's popular "Hobby Lobby" radio show on NBC. His writing prowess earlier led him to write much of the literal book on intercontinental ballistic missile training for engineers.Įlman and his wife Cheryl, a Bronx native, have lived in the Vance County countryside since 2006, and now travel the globe teaching about hypnosis, although their home on Barker Road serves as headquarters for the latest in several career paths Elman has pursued. You might say Elman, 83, got the last laugh after all.Įlman once served on a jury to determine whether the Wright Brothers' flight was actually the first one and later wrote about the result in the American Aviation Historical Society Journal, which he still contributes articles to. That's not even scraping the surface of his accomplishments in the field. By 1990, Elman had retired from the Air Force as a colonel, 30 years after being part of the first class in the world to receive a degree in space engineering, as an MIT scholarship student.