Rod Lewis

Rodney Lewis was born in Laredo in 1954, raised on a Webb County ranch, and started in the oil patch as a gas-well gauger in the late 1970s. He bought his first well in the early 1980s on a $13,000 loan and turned it into Lewis Energy Group, a San Antonio independent that has held somewhere between 350,000 and 500,000 Eagle Ford acres and is routinely described as the only American operator permitted to drill in Mexico under the Pemex monopoly — a claim repeated everywhere and sourced nowhere, so read it as lore. Forbes put him at $1.3B in 2018 and then dropped him from the list; there is no current published figure.

He is one of the largest private owners of airworthy WWII fighters in the world. Lewis Air Legends, founded in 2009 in San Antonio, has run around thirty flyable warbirds including the P-38 'Glacier Girl' pulled out of the Greenland icecap and the F8F Bearcat 'Rare Bear', and has raced in the unlimited class at Reno. He flies them himself. There is no NASCAR or stock-car connection — the racing is all air racing.

The Seattle tie is real and is the reason he is on this map: Lewis paid roughly $28M for two adjoining Lake Washington lots on Mercer Island, about 56,000 square feet of waterfront, which puts Boeing Field within a few minutes of the front door.

N747RL is a 2023 Gulfstream G600, serial 73110, hex AA0E0D, registered to Lewis Aeronautical LLC at 10101 Reunion Place in San Antonio — a direct corporate registration with no trust in the way, which is the cleanest attribution in this batch. The tail is a personal number rather than a reference to a 747: it has followed him across several unrelated aircraft, and the previous N747RL was a Citation Sovereign that now flies as N168PX for Panda Express, which is why that airframe appears elsewhere on this site with the older registration noted.