Airport Kids

Somewhere in our memories or imaginations we can still see them. Against the backdrop of a small-town airport, a young boy or girl with a bike leans up against the airport fence, watching the planes take off and land and dreaming of being in one of them someday. It's an image that's part memory, part fantasy, as much a piece of Americana as the perfect small-town baseball park. But like that field of dreams, we've begun to fear magical. Today, pilots say with a sad shake of their heads, the airport kids are all gone — a species rendered extinct by Nintendo, computer games, and a faster, more complicated world.

But just as the past was never quite as perfect as we remember it, the present is rarely as bleak as we fear. There are certainly more electronic distractions for teenagers now than there were 30 years ago, and parents today may be more reluctant to let their kids ride their bikes alone across a busy town or city.

Airports, too, are less friendly than they once were. In our concern for liability and protecting our property, we have erected tall fences and installed electronic security systems around many of our airports. Sporty's Pilot Shop reports that the company's best-selling sign is not "Learn To Fly Here!" but "Airport Property: No Trespassing. Violators Will Be Prosecuted." Once kids had only to summon the courage to walk up to an open hangar door. Today, they may have to brave barbed-wire fences, security guards, and other intimidating signs and adults to even get close to the hangar rows.

Yet, while all these changes may have thinned the ranks of airport kids across America, they have not made the breed extinct. There are still kids who look up every time an airplane flies overhead, and there are still pilots willing to offer these kids opportunities to get involved. And as long as these two things exist, there will continue to be airport kids, no matter what other changes take place in the world.

Matt Keenan

Matt Keenan always liked airplanes. He played with models when he was little and loved to watch the airliners take off and land at Seattle-Tacoma International near his home in Tacoma, Washington. He even made a couple of unsuccessful attempts to get hooked up with flying at a local airport there before his family moved to the Sacramento, California, area two years ago. The Rancho Murieta Airport was nearby, and Keenan wandered out there several times but never connected with anyone. "I'd go to look at the airplanes, but I kept thinking I was going to get arrested," he says.

The move was a tough adjustment all around, and Keenan's grades fell steadily until he finally left high school, thinking that he would pursue home schooling while working at a local grocery store. The turning point came when a friend whose father was a pilot invited Keenan to a barbecue at the airport one Saturday. Keenan met several pilots, including a guy named Ron Pizer.

Pizer took an interest in the shy, quiet teenager whose eyes lit up at the mention of flying. He began talking with Keenan when he saw him at the grocery store, drawing out pieces of Keenan's personal life, encouraging him to go back to school, and inviting him to other airport functions. In addition to taking him for rides in his own Mooney, Pizer also got Keenan opportunities to fly with some of the other pilots at the airport.

In exchange, Keenan began helping out with various jobs on the weekends. In fact, he so impressed the pilots with his meticulous detailing of Pizer's Mooney that a pilot who owned an auto body shop gave him a summer job. The talent that made him the most popular, however, was his ability to fix the pilots' computers — especially their flight simulator games.

Bolstered by the encouragement of Pizer and the other pilots, Keenan returned to high school, where he brought his grades up from a D average to almost straight As in a single semester. At the same time, he got the courage to ask around for a flight instructor and began taking lessons with a local pilot named Mike Maloney.

Realizing Keenan was paying for all of this himself while earning only a little over minimum wage, Maloney donated a lot of his time and let Keenan work off some of the cost of his instruction. Pizer and others also invited him along on cross-country trips to give him more opportunities for flight time. When he had a mere three hours of flight time logged, Keenan found himself getting dual in a Beech F33 Bonanza from a Boeing 747 captain.

Unfortunately, just about the time Keenan was ready to solo, his family moved once again — to the other side of Sacramento. But the personal involvement and support of Pizer and the other Rancho Murieta pilots has had an impact. Keenan intends to pursue flying, although his primary focus this year has been on keeping up his grades at his new school, because he now has a new goal: college.

"My parents weren't as focused on me going to college," he says. "It's not something they knew how to go about or do. But all the pilots at Rancho — they're successful, and they've been to college. They've all been places I've never seen, but I hope to someday. I never saw before what I could be, just working at a grocery store. Now...." He pauses for a moment, then smiles shyly. "I guess my standards have changed a bit."

Pizer and Keenan still keep in touch, Pizer providing what Keenan calls a "needed kick in the pants" sometimes to help keep him motivated and focused. What motivates Pizer and the others to put this kind of effort into someone else's kid? Perhaps a memory of how remote flying once seemed to them or how high the obstacles can be for a shy teenager.

"Matt liked airplanes, and we don't even have a fence around Rancho," Pizer says. "But it was still too intimidating for him without some help from us." Pizer grins, but he's being serious. "Maybe it takes an airport to create an airport kid."

Santa Paula, California

Clay Phelps didn't set out to create airport kids. It just worked out that way. Phelps, who runs an FBO at the Santa Paula airport in Southern California, was having trouble getting line help that would take really good care of his airplanes. He figured that people who were interested in airplanes would take better care of his equipment — especially if they had a chance to fly it. So Phelps put out the word that he wanted to hire high school or college students interested in learning to fly and would give them an hour of free flight time for every 20-hour week they worked, in addition to their pay.

That was 10 years ago. Today, Phelps has meticulously cared-for airplanes — and a long list of teenagers who have become pilots with his help. "It started out as a utilitarian solution," he says, "but it's more than that now. It's fun giving them something they earn themselves and helping them go in a direction maybe they couldn't have gone in otherwise."

At present Phelps has four different teenagers working for him while they build flight time. Brandy McKaig is a high school senior whose grandfather kept a plane at Santa Paula. The two were very close, but McKaig didn't think of becoming a pilot until after her grandfather died. "Then I thought that if I learned how to fly, it would give me a piece of him I could hold on to, because he loved flying so much," she explains.

But when McKaig looked into flying lessons, she realized that the cost was simply too high for her budget. Then she found out about Phelps' arrangement with the line workers at CP Aviation. As soon as there was an opening, she went to work for him.

Mark Thrift is, in many ways, the classic airport kid. He grew up loving airplanes and even rode his bicycle out to the Santa Paula airport once or twice a week, walking his bike across the ramp to the flight line to watch the planes take off and land. But in all that time, no pilots ever gave him a ride or invited him into their hangars, and the tall, lanky kid was too shy to ask. Then three years ago, a friend at school told him that Phelps was looking for line help.

Thrift had worked at CP Aviation for several months and had logged 12 hours of dual before he discovered that the fact that his diabetes could keep him from getting a medical certificate. He knows that the rules changed recently and is hopeful that he'll eventually get his certificate. In the meantime, he's gotten to know lots of pilots at Santa Paula who let him fly with them, and he continues to work for Phelps while he pursues a history degree at the local college. "I just like airplanes so much that it's fun being down here even if I can't fly," he says.

Jason Schouten and Mike Harding, who work at CP Aviation while attending the local community college, each struck a slightly different deal with Phelps. In an effort to accelerate their flight hours, Phelps agreed to advance them extra flight time that they could "work off" in his shop.

As a result, Harding now has more than 120 flight hours and is working on his instrument rating. Schouten, meanwhile, has been taking three-hour flying lessons, three times a week. "How many 18- or 19-year-olds can afford to do that?" he asks with a lingering sense of amazement. Working in the shop also has broadened Schouten's career thoughts. "At first I told Clay I wanted to be an airline pilot," he says. "But now I feel like I could go two ways. If I can't go the commercial airline route, maybe I can go the A&P [mechanic] route."

The line crew at CP Aviation acknowledges that computer and video distractions mean that fewer kids find their way out to airports. But they don't think that they're part of a dying breed. "I think a lot of my friends would be interested if they had the opportunity," Thrift says. "I think a lot of kids have an interest, but they don't know where they'd start. It's never crossed their minds how they'd go about it, especially in a city. I used to live in Orange County [California], and there, well, you can't exactly walk onto John Wayne Airport."

A legacy of pilots

John Wayne Airport may be inaccessible now, but it was only a grass strip in the middle of some orange groves when Jack Greiner discovered airplanes. He was 13 years old, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the year was 1933. He'd gone to buy a ride in a biplane that some barnstormers operated in town and noticed that they had nobody to drum up business and sell tickets while the pilots were giving the rides. He offered to help, and soon he was coming out every weekend, selling tickets for the pilots and flying with them from town to town in their small circuit around Minneapolis.

"I'd put a pillow behind me and a broomstick in the [control stick] hole in front. We'd get in the air and they'd say, 'You got it.' That's how I learned to fly," Greiner recalls. He soloed in three hours when he turned 16, and he had a total of 50 hours' flight time when another pilot gave Greiner a chance to fly his first air show. The performance was less than a total success, as he inadvertently spun the airplane and pancaked it into the ground. But aside from splaying the landing gear sideways, he emerged unscathed and went on to flight instruct for the U.S. Army in World War II and later to fly for American Airlines.

Although a bout with polio cut his airline career short, Greiner kept rebuilding and flying old tube-and-fabric airplanes. And he never forgot those early pilots who gave him the opportunity to get into flying. Over the years Greiner has turned that gratitude into a way of life, giving an estimated 3,000 kids rides in airplanes and taking new generations of airport kids under his wing.

The first to benefit from Greiner's mentoring was a kid named Carl Buck. Buck came from a tough home situation — his parents were divorced, the family was on welfare, and the kids were left on their own a lot. When Buck turned 15 he got a paper route and started riding his bike to the airport after the route to avoid going home.

"When I first started going out to the airport, I was a kid without a rudder," Buck recalls. "I loved airplanes, but I didn't have any goal. Then one day I rode to the airport, rounded the corner of one of the hangar rows, and saw the wing of this big red biplaneæand it changed my life."

The wing belonged to Greiner's 1929 C3R Stearman biplane. "I was working on the engine," Greiner remembers, "and I needed a 7/16-inch wrench. I started down the ladder for it, and there was this kid standing at the foot of the ladder, holding out a 7/16 wrench." It was, as Humphrey Bogart might say, the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Every day for the rest of the summer, Buck came out after finishing his paper route and helped Greiner with the airplane. In return, Greiner involved Buck in his adventures, including the Antique Airplane Association fly-in at Blakesburg, Iowa. When Buck announced that he wanted to buy and build his own plane, Greiner got a friend to lend Buck $1,400 to buy an Aeronca Champ projectæand then took a four-day road trip with him to Georgia to get it. After they restored the Champ, Greiner helped Buck learn to fly it. His solo cross-country was back to the Blakesburg fly-in.

Dave McRoberts was the same age as Buck but already had his glider certificate when he saw Buck and Greiner working on the Champ in a dirt-floor T-hangar one day. Soon Greiner was helping McRoberts to find a similar low-cost project. McRoberts bought an Aeronca Chief in Ohio and, with a grand total of 37 hours' time as a powered-airplane pilot, ferried it home. He had an engine failure on his first solo flight with the aircraft and later had to make a forced landing on an oil tycoon's driveway, but he got the plane back to Colorado more or less in one piece.

Buck and McRoberts stayed friends over the years, accumulating logbooks full of flights and adventures with Greiner and with each other. After numerous flying jobs, including a stint as a missionary pilot in the Solomon Islands, McRoberts now flies for Continental Airlines. Buck got an aeronautical engineering degree and went to work for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Among other things, he managed the team that designed and built the mechanical components of the spacecraft and landing system for NASA's Mars Pathfinder project.

McRoberts also got a flight instructor certificate along the way and, like Greiner before him, began passing the gift of flight to yet another generation of airport kids. Among them was a youngster named Ben Webster, who had met Greiner and his friend Vearl Root at an event where the two were giving rides in their Waco biplanes. Webster found out that they had a Piper Cub as well and asked if he could go flying in it sometime. Root told him to show up at 5 a.m. on Saturday. Webster did. Impressed, Root and Greiner invited him back. Soon, the teenager was working on their airplanes and going flying with them on a regular basis.

McRoberts became Webster's flight instructor, passing on not only flying technique, but also a sense of flying adventure. Following in the group's tradition, Webster's dual cross-country flight was to the Blakesburg fly-in. Webster helped polish McRoberts' Cessna 170 in exchange for some of the lessons, which McRoberts provided free of charge.

McRoberts has taken other kids under his wing as well, offering them rides, the opportunity to be part of the airport community, and flight instruction — often for free. "If I see somebody who's desperately poor but wants to fly, there's no way in the world I'm going to charge them. Part of that's my own philosophy, but part of it's my experiences with the people who offered me opportunities when I was younger," McRoberts explains.

At the age of 23, Webster now has his commercial certificate and instrument and seaplane ratings and is working on becoming a CFI. At the same time, he's going to college full-time and working at a local FBO. When he was little, he wanted to be an airline pilot. He still might end up doing that but, because of Root, Greiner, and McRoberts, the path he takes will be very different.

"I learned as much about how to live from these guys as I did about how to fly," he says. "Now I want to take the scenic route and experience as much as I can along the way. If you just drop your money on the counter and build hours to become an airline pilot, that's not flying. That's getting a job. Flying's being a part of this whole community and giving it back to other people. You learn from these guys and then find some kid someday you can pass it on to."

The world has changed, and there are undeniably fewer airport kids than there once were. The species may not be extinct, but it is certainly endangered. Yet there are still teenagers who find their way to an airport, longing for the chance to get closer to these magical machines of freedom and adventure. The tragedy is that we may never know about many of them, because they'll never get closer than the airport fence.

But there are others who have lucked out — met the right person, asked the right question, or made the right connection at just the right time — to get them past the fence and into the airport community. And those who have found their way inside, who have gotten the chance to turn dream into reality or discovered by chance that this thing called flying was something worth doing, can tell us a lot about flying and kids.

In the end, what they tell us is that some things haven't really changed all that much. Airport kids have always been the products not only of desire, but also of opportunity. That romantic image of the kid at the airport fence leaves out a critical element of the pictureæthe pilot on the other side who invited that boy or girl over the fence and into the world of flying.

Kids still dream of flying, even with all the distractions of a modern-day world. And we still have the power to turn those dreams into pilots. But it takes a willingness to balance airport security with airport accessibility. It takes the effort not only to welcome enthusiasts, but also to search out kids who never considered aviation a realistic possibility.

"Most people don't realize they want to fly unless they're exposed to it at some point," Webster points out. "And it takes more than just talking about flying, or even taking a kid flying. Kids need someone to invite them into their hangar to do something, so they feel a part of it. A kid has to feel like it's something special, and he's part of it, to give him the motivation to pursue it."

But most important, it takes pilots who have enough of a passion for flying that they're willing to invest a significant amount of time to encourage and support a young person's interest in it. "If you want to find kids like me," Webster concludes, "look for guys like Jack Greiner. Look behind them, and you'll find us."

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Lane E. Wallace, AOPA 896621, is an aviation writer and private pilot based in California and a former airport kid.