Stuart Lane - Veteran, Pilot, Father, Surveyor
We all experience frustration when confronted with products, systems, or processes that fail to work as intended or are poorly designed. In most cases, we trust that the experts responsible for planning, designing, and building them know what they are doing.
Excellence does not happen by accident. Professionals across every field invest years in education, training, and practical experience to master their craft and understand best practices. Through that expertise, they often lead their organizations in the pursuit of quality, accuracy, and precision.
Our founding fathers are a good example of this. Many of them had backgrounds in surveying and engineering, so they knew the importance of detail and accuracy.
Another example of a surveyor with an unwavering commitment to doing things the right way, was Stuart R. Lane, a surveyor based in Kingman Arizona.
Stuart R. Lane’s Childhood
Stuart was born in Brawley, California where his great grandmother had settled after an arduous trip from Kansas in a covered wagon. By the time Stuart was born in 1945, his father was co-owner of a large equipment company, and the family was thriving. Unfortunately, his father died when Stuart was 10, and years of instability followed. He eventually joined his mother in Phoenix where he attended Central High School. At the beginning of his senior year, Stuart’s love of chemistry, math, and physics came to an explosive conclusion - he taught himself how to build bombs and set one off during halftime at a football game. He also hotwired a car with his brother and drove to Portland Oregon. At court, the judge told them they could go to jail or join the army. At age 17 Stuart joined the Army and subsequently earned his GED.
A long, varied and fruitful career
Stuart made the most of his time in the military. He was trained as an electronic test equipment technician tasked with diagnosing and repairing electronic equipment down to the component level using oscilloscopes, multimeters, signal generators, and spectrum analyzers.
In the Army, he also got his first taste of flying aircraft - and jumping out of them. Stuart was known for his stamina and fearless disregard for danger which earned him a place in the Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol (LRRP), a unit later reorganized into the 75th Infantry Regiment (Rangers).
During the Cold War, while based in Germany, Stuart’s LRRP team training involved being dropped behind enemy lines, with only some coordinates, a compass and a weapon. They had to find their way to that set of coordinates to be returned to the base. The real mission, which thankfully never happened, was that different team members would have components of a bomb which would then be assembled and detonated in enemy territory.
Stuart developed a love of flying and skydiving that continued even after he left the service. He competed in many skydiving competitions, eventually becoming the Western Conference Skydiving Champion. This competition involves jumping out of a plane to and guiding your parachute to land on a disc 10 cm in diameter. Though his competitive skydiving days ended when he started his family, he still skydived recreationally well into his 70s.
After leaving the army, Stuart married Diane Charles, a stewardess for TWA. They eventually settled down in Kingman, Arizona where Diane would help him build his business as they raised their two children, Matt and Wendy.
An impressive surveying career
To start his surveying career, Stuart completed a correspondence course in land surveying and civil engineering from ICS – while working full-time as a rod man for aerial surveying while raising a young family. His daughter Wendy remembers him working at the kitchen table every night after dinner. She was fascinated by surveying instruments and her father’s plumb bob was one of her favorite toys.
In the mid-seventies, he founded his own company, Lane Surveying and Mapping, specializing in aerial mapping. He eventually bought 40 acres near Kingman and designed and built his own straw-bale house. Wendy has many wonderful memories of growing up in the beautiful desert countryside and going flying with her father.
Later, he joined the Mohave County Public Works department, ultimately becoming Mohave County Surveyor in 1997. In this position, he surveyed much of Arizona and parts of southern Utah and Nevada. He was a member of Arizona Professional Land Surveyors and was selected by Governor Janet Napolitano to serve on the Arizona State Board of Technical Registration, later becoming Chairman. He also taught surveying courses at the community college.
Life-changing meeting
It was in 1997 at Mohave County where young Mike Fondren met Stuart Lane for the first time. Mike was a part of the surveying crew, working as the Party Chief. Stuart immediately saw Mike’s potential and became his mentor. Under Stuart’s meticulous guidance, Mike learned to do things the right way and how to use technology to improve the job and the outcomes. Stuart mentored Mike throughout his journey to become a licensed surveyor. One of Stuart’s favorite lines was “When you get licensed, you get an opinion.” Today, Mike is enjoying a thriving surveying career, all because Stuart cared.
Mike tells a story about how they were out surveying and the General Land Office (GLO) monument at the top of a large hill would seem to move around. Stuart couldn’t tolerate that and investigated. The previous surveyor told them that the monument was just lodged in a pile of rocks, and every night the cows wandering on the range knocked it over. Every day, the surveyors would put it back up. Stuart put an end to that – the team had to haul concrete up that hill and set the monument properly.
Stuart loved teaching – he even taught the county engineers how to survey roads properly.
Cadastral monument preservation was a big push in the late 90s. To get grants for flood control, the county surveyed hundreds of miles worth for height modernization. At that time only 5-6 GPS satellites were available, so they had to use static control and ran a lot of traverses. Most people back then didn’t trust GPS, but Stuart did, because he had helped to set GPS up originally earlier in his career. So instead of levels, the crew got elevations to rural areas with GPS.
After Stuart’s retirement, he continued to fly county employees to various conferences and meetings throughout the state. A wonderful blend of his passion for flying and his surveying career.
Final Point
Stuart’s Final Point Marker
Stuart Lane passed away on October 15, 2025. Family members and many of his former colleagues, including Mike Fondren, honored him with a Final Point Ceremony on March 9, 2026 at the Mohave County Public Works building in Kingman. It was a fitting tribute to a man who had such a powerful and lasting impact on his friends and colleagues – as well as everyone else in the region who rely on the precision and professionalism of the surveyors and engineers that plan and manage the infrastructure that keeps everything running smoothly.
Since 2003, the Final Point program has honored surveyors across the United States through a partnership between Berntsen International and the National Society of Professional Surveyors (NSPS) Foundation.
Every Final Point purchase also contributes directly to the Berntsen/NSPS Foundation Scholarship and NSPS Fund, helping support students entering the surveying profession and continuing a tradition of investing in the future of the industry.
Learn more here.
Special thanks to Wendy Lane, Stuart’s daughter and Mike Fondren, former colleague, for sharing their memories about Stuart Lane, a surveyor, who, like our founding fathers, helped build our beautiful nation.