RE Log - Spring 2024

SPRING 2024 Ransom Everglades LOG 27 not.’ I’m the one who’s responsible for my training.” The Tamiami incident inspired him not only to take a firmer hand in his own training, but also to share the value of training with others. With the encouragement of RE visual art teachers Astrid Dalins and Matt Stock, he started the RE Flyers club, hosting guest speakers from the industry and giving students a space to do their own flight simulator training. Stock, the club sponsor, carved out a space in the photography lab for a state-of-the-art simulator purchased with generous donations from RE alumni involved in aviation. “Nathaniel was a rockstar,” Stock said. “He blended his passion for aviation and photography in ways I haven’t seen since. [His] leadership allowed students to step into aviation in a way that would not be possible otherwise.” During his student years at RE, he also helped found the Ransom Everglades Epic Fishing (REEF) tournament, an event that for more than a decade has brought seafaring alumni together to raise money for RE’s waterfront and Breakthrough Miami. After graduation and while he was at Dartmouth, Johansson’s career as an aviator quite literally took off. He started his own ferry flight business, delivering single-engine planes to their buyers everywhere in the world. The first opportunity arrived when he got a call from a man who had bought a plane on Craigslist and needed it delivered to The Bahamas. It was a 1953 Cessna 150: 60 horsepower, falling apart, still smelling like mid-century cigarettes. Between classes at Dartmouth, he spent a day fixing it up and another day praying it would hold together. “There’s a special word in the dictionary for these,” he said at the assembly, gesturing toward a picture of the beat-up plane. “This is called a piece of garbage. But I was excited. I was desperate to get my first delivery.” When he booked the Pilatus job that would land him in the middle of the ocean two years later, it was indisputably an upgrade over that Cessna. The plane was state-of-the-art, fresh from the factory, and he recruited the 66-year-old Michaels, his old flight instructor and a Pilatus veteran with extensive knowledge of the company’s previous models, to help him devise a solution for taking the small plane across huge, uninterrupted swaths of the Pacific. The plane had 1,700 miles of range; Johansson removed the eight leather seats, shipped them to the customer, and added two huge, 150-gallon fuel tanks that increased it to 3,000. He worked with engineers from the company to anticipate any possible issue, even coming up with a “janky” solution for overpressurization – an unlikely, but still possible, occurrence – that involved duct tape and a water bottle. “Nathaniel was a rockstar. He blended his passion for aviation and photography in ways I haven’t seen since.” – Matt Stock, photography teacher RE sailing team in 2013