Great Beginnings
Fly Clean® was originally started on May 1, 1978, by professional football player Eddie Hinton, who was a friend of the family and my brothers Godfather.
My Start Cleaning Aircraft
I started working for Fly Clean in 1985 and went on to start my own company in 1987 where I started washing general aviation planes at Houston Southwest Airport in Arcola, Texas. I then purchased Fly Clean in 1992 and grew it to wash commercial aircraft for Federal Express, DHL, Burlington, Ryan International, Emery Worldwide, Kalitta Air, and UltrAir to name a few.
In 2003, with the changing environmental laws which resulted in the loss of a major contract, I decided to sell the remaining contracts and move into another field.
New Beginnings
I have always had a passion for aviation and after a flight to get a $100 hamburger with my wife, son, and friend who owns a plane for my birthday, my wife started asking all the right questions about plane ownership and what it would take for me to get my license. So, in 2020 I started taking flying lessons and we started looking for an airplane. We identified 5 planes we were interested in, and she started calling; she told me “I’m buying a plane today”. The plane we ended up buying belonged to Craig Barnett of Scheme Designers (schemedesigners.com) and has a beautiful paint job. Now that I was a plane owner, I started researching how to keep her clean and learned the cleaning processes had evolved to be more environmentally friendly. Craig had the plane coated with ToughGuard-Aero (toughguard-aero.com), so I started looking into this product. After speaking with Dan Reid of ToughGuard-Aero and Gary Force, one of Dan’s distributors, I decided to rebirth Fly Clean and bring this amazing product along with my years of experience detailing aircraft to my fellow aviation enthusiast.