Ray Kuhlman

Joseph Raymond "Ray" Kuhlman (born ca. 1919 in Frostburg, Maryland, died October 15, 2003 in Kinston, North Carolina) was a pilot, businessman, and minor league baseball owner. Ray joined the military prior to World War II and graduated from a new program as a Flying Sergeant in the U.S. Army Air Corps in December 1941. Kuhlman was commissioned as a second lieutenant in October 1942 and spent the rest of the war as a member of the Military Air Transportation Service (MATS) with overseas tours in India, China, Italy, and France. In 1944, Ray flew a Consolidated C-87 Liberator Express, from the United States to India en route to China for duty on what was known as the Beebe Project, but his plane and nineteen other C-87s were appropriated by the Air Transport Command and kept in India to fly The Hump over the Himalayas for the ATC.

In 1946, Kuhlman became a commercial airline pilot with Capital Airlines, which later merged with United Airlines, where he was a senior Boeing 727 pilot until he retired on May 28, 1979. An early assignment as First Officer on a Pennsylvania Central Airlines DC-3 resulted in Kuhlman being among the crew that piloted the first commercial airliner into Wheeling-Ohio County Airport ("Stifel Field") at Wheeling, West Virginia on November 1, 1946. In 1996, Kuhlman and other surviving crew members attended 50th anniversary celebrations at the airport and a mural ("Inbound to Stifel") was commissioned for the main terminal lobby showing their DC-3 coming into Wheeling.

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