On Father’s Day, the gift of flight — and family

As he lifted the red helicopter off the tarmac, the pilot mentioned he was a new father.

Joey Porterfield was strapped in next to him and looked through the canopy as Hilton Head Island Airport receded in the distance.

Porterfield’s children — Lilli, 10, and Carter Thomas, 6 — sat in the backseat. They had claimed the backseat Friday morning as a Hilton Head Helicopter Tours employee conducted a safety briefing ahead of the family’s flight.

“I guess that leaves me in the front,” Porterfield had said during the briefing before the sightseeing tour, a surprise Father’s Day present, his wife’s idea. She laughed at her husband’s deadpan delivery. Earlier she had joked about his fear of heights.

But when the helicopter lifted off, she cried.

“My life’s in that helicopter,” Carla Porterfield said, wiping away a tear beneath her sunglasses as the rotor wash blew her blonde hair.

“I don’t know why I’m crying,” she said, laughing.

She’d taken care to surprise her husband. The Cumming, Ga., family had squeezed in a visit to Hilton Head before Lilli’s softball tournament. Lilli is fair-skinned like her mother, who thought it might be wise to find a Father’s Day activity out of the sun. Hence the idea for the helicopter ride. So, on Wednesday, Carla sneaked out of the condo on a bike ride and called Hilton Head Helicopter Tours’ Lori Burch.

On Friday, Burch sat in the business’s lounge holding 3-month-old Josie Grace, whose father was out piloting the red helicopter. The tour company, which opened in January 2015, has 15 Father’s Day flights scheduled between Saturday and Sunday.

For some customers, those flights would be their first times in a helicopter.

For Lilli and Carter Thomas, it was their first time flying. Their father, a U.S. Air Force veteran, had flown before.

Joey Porterfield flew on C-130s during his five-year career as an intelligence officer. He served in Operation Desert Storm, providing targeting information and bomb damage assessments “the old fashioned way.” Nowadays, he joked, a 17-year-old kid can do the same job with a joystick, flying a drone.

Joey, 49, and Carla, 45, met in their 30s and got pregnant long after many of their friends.

“How do you know how to be a father?” Carla remembers asking Joey when she was pregnant with Lilli.

“‘I’ll try to be everything I wish I’d had,’” he had replied.

Joey’s biological father abandoned him and his mother, and the man died when Joey was 15. Joey never really knew him. His stepfather adopted him when he was 8, and he grew up with a friend whose dad he considered a surrogate father.

“My mother and grandmother played the role of ‘father,’” Joey said after the tour.

“I knew all the things I didn’t want to be,” he said — a man who ran out on his family, he explained, or drank too much and acted like a fool.

Joey’s “(the kind of father) I never had,” Carla said, crediting her dad for her sense of adventure but calling him “a tortured soul” who’d dealt with drug and alcohol issues.

Her dad is an artist, and she’d grown up a “latchkey kid.” She was his shadow, she said, and sometimes he put her in “dangerous situations” — like the time he took her skiing during a Montana blizzard. He recently apologized for that, she said. He’s a fiercely loyal man — just one who didn’t always make good decisions. Still, she’s always known she was loved.

“Joey is all the good things about my dad,” she said, “and fortunately none of the bad.”

Fiercely loyal, she said.

Protective.

And fun.

Lilli had been quiet during the helicopter flight, Joey said, but Carter Thomas had sung the entire time. A tune from the Disney cartoon “Little Einsteins.” And a song by hip-hop artist Flo Rida.

“Yes, Flo Rida,” Joey had joked after landing, “which probably says something about my parenting skills.”

After they’d landed, the family posed for a picture in front of the nose of the red helicopter. The rotors continued to spin as the kids squinted in the sunlight. Carter Thomas may — or may not — have looked at the camera.

Behind the family, sitting in the cockpit, pilot Isaiah Burch leaned forward to get in the picture. He gave a thumbs-up and smiled.

On Sunday, before he starts ferrying fathers and their children around the island, he’ll take Josie Grace up for her first flight.

But he doesn’t know that yet, according to his wife.

Because it’s a surprise.

This story was originally published June 19, 2016 at 9:00 AM with the headline "On Father’s Day, the gift of flight — and family."