Martin J. Tibbitts was an entrepreneur but his passion was flying vintage military aircraft.
“I fell in love with Cold War jet aviation,” Tibbitts, who went by Marty, told the Free Press in 2015.
Tibbitts was at the controls of one such plane, a de Havilland DH112 Venom, on Friday when it crashed shortly after takeoff from Sheboygan County Memorial Airport in Wisconsin.
Tibbitts was killed when the plane struck a barn. Two farm workers also were injured. One of them was airlifted to a hospital. Between 40 and 50 cattle died in the ensuing fire, investigators said.
The cause of the crash remains unclear. The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating, but it sometimes takes weeks or months to reach a conclusion.
Tibbitts, 50, of Grosse Pointe Park, was a co-founder of the World Heritage Air Museum, which owns eight vintage planes, including the one he was flying Friday.
"Marty was a joy," said Joe Walker, a long-time friend and business associate. "He was one of those visionaries in business, always had great vision, great ideas."
Tibbitts' day job was CEO of Clementine Lives Answering Service in Harper Woods and he also was active in the Young Presidents Organization, a professional group for executives.
Walker said Tibbitts had flown the plane to Wisconsin to take part in the EAA Airventure Oshkosh, an annual event billed as the "world's largest gathering of aviation enthusiasts." Tibbitts had attended the event for years.
The Sheboygan airport was hosting a vintage aircraft formation flying clinic ahead of the larger Oshkosh event, which begins Monday.
"He texted me on Wednesday to say that he'd just landed in Sheboygan," Walker said.
Tibbitts was taking the plane up Friday to fly in formation with two other military planes. He was first to take off with the other two right behind him.
The plane crashed just seconds after takeoff.
First responders on the scene of airplane crash off County Road O near the Sheboygan County Memorial Airport Friday, July 20, 2018, in Sheboygan Falls, Wis. (Photo: Josh Clark/USA TODAY NETWORK-Wis)
The plane was one of only a handful of de Havilland DH112 Venoms in the world that was still flying, according to the museum website.
The plane is a British postwar single-engine jet flown by Switzerland until 1983 and imported into the U.S. in the 1990s. The Venom served as a single-seat fighter-bomber and two-seat night fighter. It first flew in 1949, and was designed to be a faster, more agile replacement to the Vampire, according to the museum.
Tibbitts co-founded the museum telling the Free Press in 2015 that prices of used military jets have fallen as much as 90 percent in the last decade, in part because new regulations made it harder to get the special pilots’ licenses required.
But that made the hobby far more affordable, Tibbitts said. He had recently bought a plane for $75,000 “that had cost about 10 times that” a decade ago, he said.
Still, flying a vintage fighter is far more demanding, physically and mentally, than piloting a propeller-driven plane, Tibbitts said.
“When you’re going as fast as we do, you don’t have much time to correct a mistake,” he said at the time.
Tibbitts is survived by his wife, Belinda; children Mason and Julia; and stepdaughter, Cameron. Funeral arrangements are pending, Walker said.
The Associated Press and The Sheboygan Press contributed to this report. Contact John Wisely: 313-222-6825 of jwisely@freepress.com. On Twitter @jwisely.
►Make it easy to keep up to date with more stories like this. Download the WZZM 13 app now.
Have a news tip? Email news@wzzm13.com, visit our Facebook page or Twitter.