Pilots

Henry Kisor, 54, is like a lot of new private pilots in their early 50s. His aviation fascination has been lifelong, but learning to fly waited until family obligations were met. Unlike most other new "50-something" pilots, however, Kisor is deaf.

"I have been totally deaf since age 3 1/2, from meningitis," says Kisor. "I have no measurable hearing at all; I am deaf as a post, deaf as a doornail. I depend entirely on lipreading and speech to communicate with others.

"As a child," he continues, "I was both a train nut and an aviation nut, building model railroads and model airplanes with my father." Kisor loves large objects that make lots of noise. "Though I can't hear them, I can 'feel' them," he says, "and the vibrations are glorious."

Kisor is book editor for the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper, and an author. While on a trip aboard Amtrak's California Zephyr, researching a book he was writing, Kisor met Bob Locher — a businessman, pilot, and Cessna 172 owner — who invited him for a flight.

"After my first ride in his 172, I was utterly hooked," says Kisor. "By then it was financially possible for me to learn to fly. [But] the local flight schools told me they weren't 'set up to train the handicapped,' including one school with a national reputation."

Locher suggested his own instructor, Tom Horton, who had previously taken a deaf student to the private certificate. So in March 1993, with Horton as his instructor, Kisor started his flight training in Cessna 152s at the Westosha Flying Club in Wilmot, Wisconsin, 50 miles northwest of his home in Evanston, Illinois. "We got along very well," says Kisor of Horton. "Tom is very easy to lip- read, and I suspect he does a lot of lipreading himself, after a lifetime of sitting behind noisy engines."

During training, some accommodations were made for Kisor's hearing impairment. "When Tom needed to explain something to me at length," says Kisor, "he would take the yoke and fly the plane so that I could direct my eyes to his face while listening." Touch-and-go landings sometimes required pulling off the taxiway. "It just wasn't possible for me to fly the pattern and listen to Tom evaluate my landing." Taxiway critiques were "a bit time-consuming, yes, but it worked," he adds.

Horton says Kisor must really study the weather before departure on any cross-country flight. "He can't get weather while airborne. He's very conservative, and I kind of stressed that," he adds. DUAT computer weather briefings are a godsend for pilots like Kisor.

A deaf pilot must apply for a Statement of Demonstrated Ability for which an FAA inspector checks, among other things, to see if the pilot recognizes the signs of an imminent stall. "We can't hear the stall warning," says Kisor of himself and the other 70 or so deaf pilots in the United States. "We have to use other methods — airspeed indicator, mushy controls." A change in engine note signals an engine failure to them. "We're very sensitive to vibration," he says.

In May 1994, with 121 hours in his logbook, Kisor passed the private pilot checkride administered by an FAA inspector. His certificate bears the restriction "Not Valid for Flights Requiring the Use of Radio."

"Basically, we're like any other nordo pilot," he says. "Some of us have hopes that digital communications will improve to the point where we will be able to communicate by radio and earn our IFR ratings."

Last year, Kisor joined other pilots who had formed the International Deaf Pilots Association to learn from each other and to inform the larger aviation world of their existence as pilots. "These pilots are a constant source of inspiration and information for me," he says. There are, at last count, 44 deaf pilots in the group, including one Frenchman. Kisor serves as the organization's newsletter editor.

Information on membership in the association is available from Joseph Stevens at 600 Fernwood Farms Road, Chesapeake, Virginia 23320.

"One of the reasons I learned to fly, I will cheerfully admit," says Kisor, "is so I could have another subject for a book. When I learned of Cal Rodgers' pioneering transcontinental flight of 1911 in a Wright Model EX called he Vin Fiz, I immediately thought a reenactment would be appropriate."

Shortly after beginning research about the Rodgers flight, Kisor learned that Rodgers, too, was severely hearing impaired. "Suddenly this enterprise became a personal one," he says. "He was shy, taciturn, and withdrawn among strangers, as so many deaf people are. I thought that perhaps by retracing the route, I could recreate, however imaginatively, his personality and character as a pilot and as a hearing-impaired American.

"Along the way I intend to collect as much interesting 'baggage' as I can for the book, to show something about the state of grassroots aviation in America in the 1990s." Kisor wants to hear stories about aviation people and places on or near his route, especially if they have overcome some sort of hardship.

Kisor plans to begin the trip on July 1, flying from New York to Chicago; continuing to Austin, Texas, in the last week of August; and flying the final segment, from Austin to Los Angeles, during the last two weeks in September.

Readers can mail suggested topics to 2800 Harrison Street, Evanston, Illinois 60201; telephone 708/491-6954, fax 708/491-6995; or via the Internet at [email protected].