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Lisa Marie’s Plane

Elvis's Plane - The Lisa Marie

Elvis’s wildest year was 1975. I spent most of spring and summer with Elvis. Between flying back and forth from Memphis and tour, I also had to run my business.  But I had a chance to spend some personal time with Elvis attending football games and we made half a dozen trips to Dallas to check on the remodeling of the Lisa Marie.

Another one of my favorite things to do was ride in the jump seat of the Lisa Marie. We had a pilot, co-pilot and a stewardess, who were regulars on board. It was really neat to ride up front in a big airplane, especially when it was landing and coming into a city. One of the interesting things was air traffic controllers would track us all the way across the country if we were going from California to Memphis. Every time we would enter another air traffic control area, the air traffic controllers of course knew the Lisa Marie, and they would ask the pilot, “Do you have Elvis on board?” And of course we’d say we did and then we would get all kinds of messages for him from the air traffic controllers- “Tell Elvis this . . . Tell Elvis that . . . Tell Elvis we love him.”