Pilots

Ahh, the extent to which youth will go to reach the sky. We all remember those crusty morality tales from now-ancient airport kids who washed Cub wings or hauled five-gallon gas cans to a barnstormer's Jenny, all to pay for a few minutes of flight. And then there's the version told by Bob LoTurco.

Back many years ago (and LoTurco is just 34), flying first caught his attention when he found out about an offer Cessna had going: You would pay just $2,695 and the company would guarantee you a pilot certificate. "To a 13- or 14-year-old, that much money was unheard of — it would be like buying a jet," he says. But LoTurco, a native of Long Island, New York, did manage to scrounge up the twenty bucks for a Discovery Flight. "I knew that was it," he says. "It was beautiful."

Still, the full price of that certificate remained out of reach. Now if this were one of those old- fashioned stories, we would now see LoTurco trudging toward the local airstrip, gripping a garden hose and a 12-ounce tin of Rally Buff-N-Shine. But LoTurco, an avowed tinkerer, thought there might be a different approach to getting into the air — and a shortcut to all those hours bouncing around the pattern in a 152. Some time passed, and he checked into those once-ubiquitous ads to build a Bensen gyrocopter — but backed away at the price tag: up to $5,000. "Then," he says, "I investigated what was involved with hot air balloons."

After teaching himself a bit about hydrostatics, he designed a 40,000-cubic-foot, 71-foot-tall balloon — one that, when inflated, would lift him and a passenger. From a supplier he wrangled, at wholesale, 900 square yards of teal, red, and orange ripstop nylon, which he stitched together in a patchwork pattern on a used sewing machine. For the basket he began with a plywood floor and an aluminum frame, wrapped it with two layers of chicken wire and papier-m�che, and painted it tan to resemble wicker. The whole works weighed 615 pounds and took a few years from genesis to, uh, exodus.

Early one morning he and some old high school buddies loaded it onto the tailgate of a green Grand Torino station wagon and drove it to perhaps the only open space upon Long Island's densely suburban landscape, a nearby school parking lot. There they dragged the envelope out and started cold, inflating it with two house fans powered by a portable generator. He heated the air inside with his homemade burner, and the patchwork envelope slowly began to rise off its side. Blissfully unaware of a thousand and one Federal Aviation Regulations that he was about to violate, LoTurco hopped inside the basket, and the makeshift apparatus lifted off. "I looked down and I was 60 feet off the ground," he says. "I was heading north and no longer over the parking lot. I could hear Mom yelling, 'Bobby! Come back!'"

When the balloon reached 475 feet, the burner's pilot flame blew out. LoTurco unsuccessfully tried relighting it with matches, and the balloon started coming down — on the front lawn of a ranch home. The man of the house arrived at the door, startled by the colorful bobbing quilt work that he found suddenly squatting in his yard. LoTurco expected fireworks, but "the man was amazed — he looked like he was honored that I had almost landed on top of his car." Then, from all directions, 10 screaming police cruisers screeched to a halt, and cops and neighbors surrounded LoTurco — and gleefully helped him pack up the now-deflated envelope. "It was an amazing day, a beautiful day," says LoTurco.

Ten uneventful flights followed. Then, during a long flight one evening, he and a friend were floating along when they just ran out of fuel. The balloon came down next to some residential power lines, and LoTurco dismounted, ready to deflate the envelope. But when his friend tumbled from the basket, the balloon popped up and brought the power lines together. Sparks flew — and then the whole neighborhood went black.

"I'm saying to myself, 'I'm in trouble now,'" LoTurco recalls; he was expecting the hundreds of people who came from nowhere to turn into a lynch mob. "Then a lady pushed her kid in front of me and said, 'I want to take a picture of you with my kid,'" and he knew it was going to be all right. The power company came and had service quickly restored. The cops also came again and escorted LoTurco home. Although they remained jocular, this time they made him promise to hang up his envelope for good.

In a way, though, LoTurco was ready; that year he started taking lessons — fixed-wing lessons — out at Republic Airport. But after logging 17 hours (and learning about some of the regulations that he had busted), he got discouraged. And, well, then came marriage, kids, a series of mechanic's jobs with local industries — and time just got away from him.

But a couple of years ago, one of his former ballooning buddies said he was going for his pilot's certificate, and that got to LoTurco. He started going out to the airport again, finished his private certificate, and now he's working on his instrument ticket. He's even thinking about getting back into balloons — legitimately, of course.

Although this story is a bit twisted, it does have a time-honored moral after all. "Never lose sight of your goal," LoTurco says. "If you're willing to work hard enough, you can accomplish it."

It also comes with a warning, too: Kids, don't try this one at home.