move parts, although the airplane is outfitted more for people than parts.
“With as fast as things move nowa-days with computers and e-mail and fax machines, and as fast as everybody is doing things, living in a small town with no access to major air carriers, there’s no way we could get as much done as we do if we weren’t able to use the airplane. We’ll carry people to Dallas, El Paso, or Albuquerque. It’s two hours to Dallas.”
Patterson reports that nearly all of the company’s major holdings 20 years ago were in southeast New Mexico. “Since that time, using the airplane, we’ve operated wells in Louisiana, the south coast of Texas and Kentucky. We’re drilling very heavily in Wyoming. We operate wells in Utah, and other places. We’ve spread out considerably, and the airplane has helped that. We wouldn’t be able to do it nearly to the extent we’ve been able to without the use of the airplane,” he says.
And as one of Artesia’s largest employers, the company feels some-what of a duty to help out in town from time to time, Patterson says. “If there’s a medical emergency, we’ve used the airplane to help somebody who has a heart problem, or who needs to get to the doctor in a hurry; we’ve flown peo-ple to Albuquerque and Lubbock.
“For folks here in town – you know this is a small town, less than 12,000 people, so it’s a very close-knit community – we do some community-type functions. To give you an example, right now we have a big Main Street development program, where a group of citizens and the Chamber of Commerce are trying to spiff up Main Street. We’re building a fountain in one of our Main Street areas downtown. We’ve used the airplane to carry some of the people on the committee to meetings with architects or to look at other towns. That’s just a community service we do. One of our officers is on that committee so we help out. As I said, it’s a small town.
“Once a year, we go around and gather up the New Mexico doctors and fly down to Mexico and do medical work down there – take eye doctors and regular doctors, a whole bunch of them, and help out in some of the impoverished places down in Mexico. We’ve done that four of the last six years.
“Last year, we had a terrible bus accident up in the mountains west of here. A load of kids on a church bus was driving home to Lubbock, Texas. A fellow lost control of a trailer and they hit head-on. It killed, I think, seven of the kids and hurt a bunch of the oth-ers. We flew shuttle flights over to Lubbock and picked up parents and brought them here, or took parents back to Lubbock who had gotten here some other way. Those people we didn’t know – we didn’t know any of them – may never see them again, but we knew that it was something that the town was involved in, the community was involved in, and it was important to do.”
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