Winging It: Charles Isdell's departure is a loss for Phila.

Charles J. Isdell retires at the end of this week as the city's aviation director and boss of Philadelphia International Airport, and I will be among many who are sorry to see him go. I hope that Mayor Nutter chooses a successor with the same skills and personality traits Isdell possesses.

Isdell, 58, had planned for several years to retire this summer, but he submitted his resignation earlier this month. The abrupt change in plans came after a local TV station found that he was spending time at his wife's home in Cherry Hill since he married for a second time 18 months ago.

Philadelphia requires its employees to live in the city. Isdell told me he believed he was following the letter of the law by continuing to own the home in the Northeast where he grew up and where he said he could have been videotaped on the same days he was ambushed in Cherry Hill.

Nutter said the matter wouldn't be investigated because Isdell resigned.

Whether Isdell violated the residency rule I will leave to others to debate.

This I know for sure: The airport and the city are better off having had the services of this career bureaucrat, who wants to teach high school English as a "retirement" job.

Isdell was the sixth person to serve as Philadelphia aviation director since I started reporting on the airport in the early 1980s. He was the only one of the six who was a native of the region and who had not spent most of his or her working life running airports.

When the first director I knew, Howard Willoughby, took charge, Philadelphia International was far more embarrassing than some of you think it is now. It was run in the Rizzo years by political appointees who didn't do much long-range thinking about how to improve it.

Willoughby, former manager of the Kansas City airport, and his successor, Jim DeLong, who had been deputy director of Houston's airports, spent much of their time fixing what was broken. DeLong, who took over in 1987, once told me he was "the guy who had to bring in the color-coordinated, architecturally designed buckets to catch all the leaks in the roof."

At that time, Isdell had worked for the city for 15 years in the Human Resources and Purchasing Departments and the Office of the City Representative. DeLong hired him to streamline an airport purchasing and contracting process so convoluted that it took four months to replenish the stock of restroom toilet paper. DeLong then kept him on in a succession of other management roles.

Mary Rose Loney, who became director in 1993 and is now an airport consultant, recalled last week that she had to keep other city departments that envied Isdell's management skills from luring him away.

"He naturally migrated to management challenges at the airport and brought the discipline on contracting with him," she said.

Isdell also was learning the flight-operations side of the airport at the same time. He played an important role during the 30-inch snowstorm of 1996, when Philadelphia was the last East Coast airport to close and the first to reopen, Loney said. At Loney's urging, Isdell earned accreditation as an airport administrator from the American Association of Airport Executives.

Isdell was interim airport director during national searches for two more managers, Dennis Bouey and Fred Testa, and then stayed on to work for both of them. John Street named him director in December 2000, almost a year after he fired Testa.

When he finally got the job, and many times since, Isdell was cited for his understanding of city government, his effort to modernize and make the airport more user-friendly, and his calm and steady management style.

Jeff Shull, who worked for Isdell from 1996 to 2005, and is now a senior vice president of Air-Transport IT Services, an airport-technology company, said his former boss was respected in City Council and the Mayor's Office.

"Look at what the airport means for Philadelphia," Shull said. "I would be hard-pressed to name anybody who's made a better contribution than Charlie has. . . . He was always very focused on what the public's perception is."

Last fall, I had a chance to talk informally with Isdell in his airport office without the usual retinue of deputies around him. I knew he was a voracious reader but didn't know until then how serious he is about finally using the bachelor's degree in literature he earned at Temple University in the 1970s.

He told me about his background and said his "dream job" in retirement is to teach high school English or to work as an editor. He also has a master's degree in dance education from Temple, and at different times has taught dance and movement to blind and deaf students.

So I hope the University of Pennsylvania, where Isdell has been working for several years on his teaching certificate, finds him a student-teaching gig this spring. This is a Renaissance man who wants to teach in a Philadelphia public school, and it's very likely he could make as great a contribution there as he has at the airport.