His Story
Captain Joseph T. Schoofs
Aviator. Builder. Craftsman. A life spent in the air, on the ground, and everywhere in between.
Aviator. Builder. Craftsman. A life spent in the air, on the ground, and everywhere in between.
Before you read — hear it from him directly
The Schoofs story begins not in a cockpit, but in the fields of Keppeln — a small farming village in the Lower Rhine region of what is now northwestern Germany, sitting so close to the Dutch border that the land itself has changed nationality more than once over the centuries. Joe's ancestors worked that soil before making the journey to America in the 1800s, settling in Kewaskum, Wisconsin, where they broke new ground and became farmers. Many of their descendants farm that same Wisconsin soil today.
From those roots came carpenters. Joe's father was a craftsman who built wooden furniture with his hands — a tradition Joe would carry forward, eventually owning his own carpentry business in the 1980s, building homes and residential complexes from the ground up. His cousin continues that legacy as one of the most accomplished carpenters in the family tradition.
When the family made the move from Kewaskum, Wisconsin to Plant City, Florida, Dick packed everything they owned into a trailer. The furniture, the belongings, the household — all of it rode outside, strapped to the truck. The WACO biplane rode inside the trailer, protected. That photograph still exists. It says everything about this family's priorities that any biography could spend a page trying to explain.
And then there were the Hemble brothers — Les and Martin, Joe's mother's brothers — who were already flying in the farm fields of Wisconsin when Dick Schoofs was a young man. Dick didn't learn to fly at a school or a program. He learned from Les and Martin, out in those open fields. He swept hangar floors, slept in the hangars, and somewhere along the way fell in love — first with the aircraft, and then with their sister.
Before the war, Les and Martin Hemble flew the Hump — the Allied supply route over the eastern Himalayas, considered the most dangerous air operation of the entire Second World War. Military commanders regarded a Hump flight as more hazardous than a bombing run over Germany. The weather alone claimed more pilots than the Japanese did. Les and Martin flew it anyway.
When the family moved from Wisconsin to Plant City, Florida, the two branches went their separate ways. The Hemble brothers went to Saluda, North Carolina — one carrying on in helicopters, the other in fixed wing. The Schoofs branch went to Atlanta with Delta, where Dick became one of the airline's earliest pilots. Caroline Etheridge Hembel — wife of one of the brothers — flew as a Women's Airforce Service Pilot during World War II, among the most skilled and least recognized aviators in American history.
The aviation didn't stop with that generation. Cousins flew. More cousins still fly today — commercial airline pilots, both men and women, carrying a family tradition into the air that began in Wisconsin farm fields before the Second World War. Aviation was not something the Schoofs and Hemble families entered. It was something they lived, taught, married into, and passed down.
Each legacy carries the same essential truth — that what you build matters more than how quickly you build it, and that the work you put into the ground outlasts you.
Joe's ancestors emigrated from Keppeln — a small farming village in the Lower Rhine region of Germany, on the border with the Netherlands — to Kewaskum, Wisconsin in the 1800s, settled on the land, and farmed it for generations. The patience of a farmer — the willingness to plant something you may not live to harvest — runs through everything Joe does. Many of his family still farm in Wisconsin today. The soil is still in the family. The discipline never left.
Joe's father built wooden furniture. Joe built homes and residential complexes — owning his own carpentry business through the 1980s. Today he builds everything from retaining walls to garden systems to furniture, fences, and beyond. If it can be designed and built, Joe has built it. His cousin carries the same tradition forward as one of the most accomplished craftsmen in the family. The Schoofs don't hire people to build things. They build them.
Dick Schoofs learned to fly in Wisconsin farm fields, taught by Les and Martin Hemble — men who would go on to fly the Hump, the Allied supply route over the Himalayas, considered the most dangerous air operation of World War II. Dick swept their hangar floors, fell in love with the aircraft, and fell in love with their sister. Caroline Etheridge Hembel flew as a WASP during the war. Cousins flew. More cousins fly today — commercial airline pilots, men and women, carrying the tradition forward. Aviation was not a career this family chose. It was a culture they never left.
Joe Schoofs did not enter aviation from the outside. He was born into a family where aviation was the native language — where his grandfather's brothers-in-law taught his father to fly in open farm fields, where a woman in the family strapped into a WASP cockpit during wartime, where cousins became commercial airline pilots, and where the standard for what flying meant was set long before Joe ever took the controls himself.
He earned his Airline Transport Pilot certificate — the highest level of pilot certification issued by the FAA. He went on to become one of fewer than one percent of active pilots in the United States to hold an FAA Designated Pilot Examiner appointment, carrying the authority of the FAA itself to test and certify the next generation of aviators.
More than twenty thousand hours in the air. Across commercial carriers, private aviation, and international operations spanning Africa, Asia, Australia, Central and South America, and the United States. Those hours represent not just time in an aircraft, but a lifetime of judgment refined through experience that cannot be taught, only accumulated.
Joe did not arrive at aviation by a single path. He earned a Master's degree in Corporate Psychology and Aviation Business from Liberty University. He owned and operated a construction company. He has lived a full life in many directions. But he kept coming back to the sky — not because it was the only thing available to him, but because it was the thing he loved most. That choice, made again and again over fifty years, is what twenty thousand hours actually means. His passion for aviation is not a credential. It is a devotion — to the craft, to the standard, and to the belief that aviation can always be safer, always be better, and always offer more.
In the 1980s, Joe owned and operated his own carpentry business — designing and building homes and residential complexes from foundation to finish. That was not a detour from aviation. It was the same work, expressed differently: the careful study of what a structure needs, the patience to build it properly, and the refusal to cut corners because someone else won't notice.
Today Joe builds everything — retaining walls, furniture, garden systems, farm fences, and whatever the project demands. He grows food from soil the way his German and Dutch ancestors grew it in Wisconsin — with attention, with care, and with the understanding that things worth having require time.
His father built furniture. His grandfather farmed. His cousin carries the carpentry tradition forward as one of the finest craftsmen in the family line. Joe is the point where all of it converges — the man who flies and builds and grows, who sees no contradiction between any of them, because in his family there never was one.
Joe's career has taken him far beyond American airspace. Twenty-five years of international operations have given him a perspective on global aviation that very few people alive don't have — earned not through study but through presence, through the slow accumulation of relationships, operational knowledge, and genuine understanding of what aviation means in different parts of the world.
Of all the places that work has carried him, none has captured his commitment more fully than Africa — where he has spent fifteen years on the ground, building the relationships and the operational framework for what World Aviator Group is today. But Africa is one chapter of a global record that continues to grow.
Dick Schoofs flew the DC-3 for Delta. Decades later, Joe brought his grandson to stand beside the same aircraft — now preserved at the Delta Flight Museum in Atlanta. The boy had his great-grandfather's love of flight. In this family, the wonder of flight does not need to be taught. It is inherited.
Tell him what you are building.
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