The Tribune

You could tell the tale of Paul Aranha’s life reeling off a series of numbers – 17,400 hours of flying, a record unlikely ever to be matched by another Bahamian, an historian whose weekly columns ran for years in this newspaper, a collector of books with 1,400 volumes including just about every one that includes The Bahamas, a seeker and hunter of postcards and a collection of 1,400 of them, some dating back to the turn of the last century.

Yes, you could, if you wanted, tell the story of Paul Aranha’s life in a series of nearly mind-blowing numbers but if you did you would barely be scratching the surface of the man who remains a living national treasure, a bounty of history and knowledge. At nearly 90, his step is a bit more cautious and he prefers small gatherings to the galas he used to attend, but at 6’3 with a mind as sharp as ever, he is a commanding figure whose story in many ways parallels that of The Bahamas itself.

It is a Monday afternoon and we are sitting in the study in his home, extremely modest by Lyford Cay standards. The study is where he spends 90 percent of his time these days, surrounded by books, including every volume of The Bahamas Handbook ever published, rare books, original Bahamas Speed Weeks hardbacks, leatherbound and paperback and while it seems almost foolish to ask, I can’t help myself. “Have you actually read all these books?”  He looks me squarely in the eye, smiles and nods yes. Every one,” he says.

1926 Bahamas Map 

That Aranha is fascinated by history and The Bahamas is not surprising.

It was his father William N. Aranha who in 1926 drew what was the official map of The Bahamas. Long before there were computers or internet or AI, the senior Aranha meticulously drew The Bahamas, every settlement on every island, the waters between the islands, every bay and cut and channel depicted and labelled. To this day, that map has been to The Bahamas what GO is to Monopoly, the starting place.

Every voyage has a starting point and the younger Aranha, the man now nearing nonagenarian status, began his flying career with gliders at 16. Like many of his peers at the time, he was shipped off to boarding school at age 13, expecting to be away from home, far from swimming in the harbour or sea, of roaming freely in what was then a sleepy Nassau village for the next five years until it was time at the end of his school career to return to family. “Fortunately, Barbara (his sister) got a job working for British Airways and was able to get a few passes,” he says, recalling how privileged he was to be able to return twice during that 5-year hiatus from home.

In typical self-deprecating fashion, Aranha says he still does not know how he qualified for such an acclaimed academic institution as Woodbridge in the UK

“Frankly, I don’t understand how I pulled it off,” he wrote in his autobiography Island Airman, published 20 years ago, “for recently, John found and gave me a copy of one of those exam papers and even now I find it impossible to answer its questions on scripture, history and geography, making me wonder why I was ever accepted.”

But accepted he was, though excel he did not, but he brought with him a love of the outdoors and quickly took to rabbit and pheasant hunting until one day there was an accident and a good friend hunting rabbits accidentally shot off two fingers of his own hand instead.

Aranha found other ways to amuse himself while in the UK and one of those was flying gliders.

It wasn’t quite like the freedom of The Bahamas that he still missed and summer adventures in Exuma which many years later would – like astronaut Scott Kelly – become his favourite place to view from the seat of an aircraft. But he kept busy and something about the gliders stirred something inside the man who would become the aviation icon of the nation. He was like a student pilot on steroids – every spare hours he could squeeze in a day or week he was in a plane, chalking up the hours, training.

16 aircraft by age 25 

His first flying job was the equivalent of a mailboat in the sky, flying for ESSO, scooting around the islands to service the fuel supplier and ferry staff and small supplies. As Chief pilot of Bahamas Aircraft Owners, he flew the Aero Commander for Dawson and Neville Roberts (both now deceased) and by the time he was 25, he had flown 16 different aircraft, some with a little more excitement than expected including the time a tail wheel blew off and he had to lift the tail section of the plane to get home from Andros.

While friends were still trying to get their first car, Aranha had flown nearly every single engine Cessna made, the Tiger Moth, Grumman Goose, Piper Apache, Piper Aztec …the list seemed almost endless though it turned out to be nothing by comparison to what lay ahead, including the first time he lost an engine in a DC-3 or another time when passengers refused to disembark from an overloaded flight in Inagua and even swearing at the local commissioner did not resolve the issue. The only solution – after an interminable standoff and no give with the whole island against him though it was not he who loaded the plane, fly them all to Nassau.                                                                                                                                       

Heady days, harrowing times

Aranha’s adventures in the sky mirrored the history of The Bahamas in so many ways. There were the heady days of flying bigwigs and royalty and the often-harrowing days of the 80s with sky-high cowboys heeding no one’s orders. He flew the Aero Commander for the Royal Bahamas Police Force, trained on jets for Bahamas Air Lines, became a flight instructor. “Flying was exciting and the excitement never diminished.” Every flight was a rush of a different kind, the type of life where adrenaline came naturally and knew no limits. The experience added up. Dozens of hours turned into hundreds, hundreds into thousands. 

From flights zipping across the Atlantic between The Bahamas, Spain and West Berlin to travels around the islands, Paul Aranha, pilot for BAL and founder of Trans Island Airways, became the pilot’s pilot.

Today the man who flew everything from a single engine prop plane to the only aircraft faster than a Concorde, the Convair 990A, basks in the solitude of his study, surrounded by his collections of books, stamps, postcards, paperweights, artworks. He relishes  time with his wife, Kim, (Bahamas Humane Society Chairman and animal protection activist of 40 years) and their children and grandchildren, including an adorable curly-haired doll about to turn one as Grandpa’s clock ticks toward 90.

“Anything you wish you had done differently?” I ask him as one of his thick leather-bound books of postcards sits partially on his leg as he politely allows me to thumb through. I feel privileged to be in the private study and personal space of such an icon.

“I would have liked to have spent more time in West Berlin when I was young,” he says, a tinge of regret that soon passes. “It was a great city then and of all the places I flew, it was my favourite.”

Instead, his flying time became increasingly Bahamas-centric as his own Trans Island Airways business grew and he experienced the best of all worlds on a regular basis – flights to and over Exuma.

“You could fly over Exuma four or five times in a single day and it would never be the same, the way the sun reflected on the waters or the sunset shone, the blues, the incoming tide, the angle of the flight and light on the water,” he said.

He worded it slightly different in Island Airman:

“Going into space must be a high for any astronaut,” he wrote. “For my part, I would like to look down at Earth and see the Bahamas.”

You did see it, Paul Aranha, more often and in more lights and shadows than any other living man.  And we are better for your having shared your memories with us.