Bobby Aue Jr., of East Rockaway, Delta Air Lines pilot, dies at 36

The skies were never the limit for Bobby Aue Jr., a “true romantic” as a pilot and a husband, family and friends said.

He fulfilled his dream of flying among the clouds at the head of airliners, and he jetted off with his wife for impromptu vacations, they said. It could be a destination picked from the airport departure boards or a flight where empty seats meant the couple could go first class. One time, he suggested pulling a landing place out of a hat and that's what they did.

“He always found a way to make travel feel like magic,” said his wife, Teresa Bianchi, of East Rockaway. “Together, we traveled with reckless abandon.”

Aue, a Delta Air Lines pilot who was a first officer, died of cardiac arrhythmia on Nov. 14, Bianchi said. The East Rockaway resident was 36.

He flew domestically out of Kennedy and LaGuardia airports in Queens after working as a pilot at a skydiving company and Endeavor Air, a Delta subsidiary. He had also been an instructor at Nassau Flyers, a flight school at Republic.

By the time he was in high school, Aue was interested in flying, "Star Wars," the Cradle of Aviation Museum and things associated with space, his wife said.

At 6-foot-4, he endured jokes like “How’s the weather up there?”

To him, it was glorious. From the cockpit, he could see the northern lights, lightning and blue skies.

“He loved all of it, getting to be up in the sky, looking at the clouds,” Bianchi said. “He said once, it’s never boring because you can fly the same route, but you would never know what the weather would look like.”

Aue matched the romance of the skies in his romance with his wife. Scrapbooks of their adventures. Love notes for her to find when he left to fly. Advent calendars every Christmas, each day containing something personal, funny or sweet. 

He was a feminist who learned from his mother and sisters how to treat women and believed in gender equality, said his wife, who bonded with him during their college years working at the Lynbrook CVS.

"His love was never passive,” Bianchi wrote in her eulogy, calling him a “true romantic.” “It was something he did, something he built, something he put care into every single day.”

He put the same devotion into family pets, those who knew him said. The couple took Amaretto, their brown-and-white Italian greyhound, to Luxembourg, Monaco and Italy among 32 round trips.

During the pandemic, when Aue was paid to stay home, the secret cat lover in him snuggled his stepmother’s cat Bonnie constantly in her last six months of life, Bianchi said: “After she died, he was grateful she never had to see him put on his uniform and leave again."

With his human friends, he was part of “Team Omega,” which originated at East Rockaway High School as a small circle of students who hung out together because they didn’t seem to fit in with other groups. In time, others joined from his pilot circles and his years at Farmingdale State College, where Aue got his aviation degree in 2011.

In Team Omega, which committed to a guys' get-together once a year, Aue was known for greeting members with bear hugs that lifted them off their feet and perhaps realigned their spines, joked Omega friend Jonathan Meneses.

Aue’s planning skills, ability to command and his strategic calculations for different scenarios made him a good pilot, said friend and pilot Andrew Medina. He was talented at handling the yoke or stick and foot pedals to move the rudder at the same time, he said. At Spadaro Airport in East Moriches, where the runway was short and narrow, he nailed the takeoff and landing on his first try, his friend said.

Due to his height, they could always spot him across a restaurant or bar and knew he was more often than not talking about flying just by his gestures, his friends said.

“ ‘My cubicle is the sky,’ ” Meneses recalled Aue saying. “That’s where he was at home.”

Besides his wife, he is also survived by his father, Robert Aue, of Fort Pierce, Florida; mother, Linda Falco, of upstate Manlius; and sisters, Jenna Dooley, of Babylon, and Katie Harden, of Lindenhurst.

A wake was held Nov. 21 at the Donza Funeral Home in East Rockaway, followed by cremation.