The name jauntily painted near the nose of the small blue and white two-seat airplane reads "Simply Magic."

For pilot Bill Warren, back in the skies and flying solo again after disease nearly took his life eight years ago, that says it all.

"Diabetes got the best of me for awhile," says Warren, 57, of Gold Hill. "There were even a couple doctors saying ‘we don’t know if you’re going to be around much longer.’ "

But Warren wasn’t willing to accept the fate doctors predicted. Not for his health — or his passion.

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"See this?" he asks, sliding out a tattered card from his wallet. "This is a pilot’s license. They don’t pull this from you unless you do something pretty heinous."

"But," he says, sliding another card across the table in the hangar at Medford Air Service. "A pilot’s license is not valid without one of these — a current medical certificate."

Generally, a diagnosis of diabetes is a death sentence to life as an aviator. But not for Warren, whose long life in the sky has included crop dusting, ferrying medical patients, flying corporate air shuttles, performing in air shows and piloting Hollywood stunt planes. He persevered, and today he is flying again — "back home."

Warren’s fascination with flying began "before conscious memory."

"Sky Billy" grew up on a farm outside Port Angeles, Wash. The boy who dreamed each night of flying got airborne in 1950 when he was only 4 years old. A $5 ticket bought him a ride on a DC-3 at a Port Angeles air show.

"My dad bought me the ride," he says. "It blew me away."

The experience deepened the desire to fly. Warren rode his bike to the airport each day after school.

"I’d stand around looking forlorn," he said. "If there was an empty seat, somebody would take me up. Once in awhile one of them would let me fly. "

Warren bought his first plane when he was 17. The two-seat, high-wing cabin monoplane was a 1946 Taylorcraft BC-12D — the same year, make and model of "Simply Magic."

As he flew, his skills grew. He joined his first air show at age 19. His own air show followed, featuring a bevy of wing-walking beauties, "The Daring Damsels."

His name landed on the ears of Hollywood producers. It was Warren flying under overpasses and freeway signs in the Kevin Costner movie "Fandango." And he doubled for Charles Grodin in "Midnight Run," flying the biplane with Robert DeNiro’s stunt man hanging from the struts.

Earlier, there were less glamorous but equally exciting assignments in Medford. In the summer Warren often worked as a crop duster. In the winter, he’d get calls to "fog seed."

"We’d sprinkle dry ice on fog to raise visibility so airliners could land," he says. "We’d go out in 0-0 (zero visibility and zero ceiling). Essentially we’d find the end of the runway. By the time we’d push the throttle forward, we were on instruments."

But the life Warren knew and loved stalled once diabetes took away his medical certificate in 1997. The Federal Aviation Administration’s medical advisers did not allow any leeway if a pilot was insulin dependent.

He eventually got the disease under control. But he still wasn’t able to fly solo.

For awhile, he tried to find another passion. Nothing fit.

"I fumbled around," Warren says.

Sometimes Warren’s pilot pals would take him up and hand him the controls, he says.

"It was perfectly legal for me to fly as long as there was another licensed pilot in the plane," he says. "But, I didn’t have a mission. It’s not good for an aviator not to have a mission."

While Warren struggled to gain control of life on the ground, the FAA was making changes in the sky.

"The FAA made a special provision that insulin-using diabetics could receive — if all health standards were met — a special issuance medical certificate," he says.

Warren met all the federal agency’s stringent requirements and testing procedures. "I jumped through all the hoops," he says.

Two years ago he passed and regained his medical certificate, which meant he could fly solo again.

Things quickly began looking so positive that he renewed his flight instructor’s license.

"Sky Billy" was back. And he had a new mission. He’d take his lifetime of studying what makes "the difference between a great pilot and a not-so-great pilot" and teach those secrets to anyone interested in learning.

"The best kind of mission is to have someone who wants to hire me to teach them to fly," says Warren. "If you have something exciting you want to share, and a guy walks in like a dry sponge, I’m pumped."

One of Warren’s students is Stefanie Conner, the granddaughter of the man who used to give Warren crop-dusting gigs.

Conner, 24, of Medford, has known Warren "since the day I was born."

Like Warren, Conner has always wanted to fly. In fact, Conner hopes to co-pilot for her father once she gets licensed.

But, unlike Warren, Conner has had to overcome a pretty serious case of nerves to chase her dream.

"On one of the first flights, I got so freaked out by the bumps (turbulence) that I wanted to walk home — from the plane," she says. "Anyone else would not have wanted to fly with me. But he is so patient."

Warren says flying "ain’t no thinkin’ thing." He believes we all have instinctual knowledge of flight. The key, he says, is to tap into that knowledge.

"I don’t teach by instruments," he says. "By the time the instruments have registered, you’re behind the airplane."

In addition to his "fly by feel" method of training, his years of aerobatics flying have made Warren a much-sought-after teacher of "spin training."

Hardly any pilots still teach the maneuver that sends pilot and plane hurtling toward the ground in a controlled corkscrew spin.

But Warren says once the FAA stopped requiring spin training, the stall-spin accident became the number one killer of pilots.

"The first spin I was ever in was accidental and I was unprepared to handle it," says Warren. "Once I became an instructor, I just felt nobody should be flying around in an airplane that will do something that they can’t recover from."

Conner says after hours of standard flight instruction, Warren insisted she learn how to save herself in the event of just such an emergency before she could solo.

"I don’t think we even did one revolution before I reached over, grabbed his leg and screamed, "Oh my God! We’re going to die!" she says.

Warren says most fears are based on false perception.

"Your fears are telling you it’s all going to hell in a handbasket," he says. "But the truth of the matter is another."

Conner says Warren didn’t flinch at her death-grip on his leg. Just calmly ended the spin and offered some comfort.

"I cried for a good 20 minutes. I just knew we were going to die," says Conner. "But he kept me safe."

Unlike Conner, Jim Haran, 43, sought Warren out precisely to learn spin-training.

Taking an aircraft to 4,000 feet and spiraling toward earth can be dangerous. Haran says he wanted to learn from someone with a lot of experience — and in a dual-controlled plane that could handle the move.

Haran, of Jacksonville, says there are many cases where pilots are slowed down in landing patterns and "the plane is in a dangerous position."

"I’m not interested in the thrill factor," says Haran. "Bill has talent and experience beyond belief. He teaches how to recover and get it back to level."

Under sunny skies on the tarmac at Medford Air Service, Warren does his preflight walk-through in preparation for his next lesson. He looks at the plane’s other decoration — a decal of Merlin the Magician and smiles at the small purple wizard.

"It’s always good to have a man around who can wave a magic stick when you go flyin’," says Warren.

"Celebrating Flight — A History of Aviation in Southern Oregon."

In one clip, Warren and the Daring Damsels perform in his air show, "Bill Warren and The Great American Flying Circus." Warren pilots his biplane while the two "damsels" perform the only simultaneous wingwalking act known to exist.

In another 16-minute clip, a 30-year-old Warren appears in the TV show "Breakaway" with William Shatner. Warren lands his plane on top of a car driven by Shatner at 60 mph. The clip closes with Warren enjoying his own brand of cross-country flying — dipping his plane’s wingtips into the Rogue River, performing aerial maneuvers over Table Rock and more.

SOHS is at 106 N. Central Ave., Medford.

The exhibit will remain until December.

Call 773-6536 for hours.

Reach reporter Sanne Specht at 776-4497 or e-mail sspecht@mailtribune.com.