If someone is looking to a future of flying fighter jets or complex helicopters, it’s easy to understand why they may overlook flying a small aircraft. But at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, a group of students is working hard to fly the smallest, lowest-performing aircraft they can get their hands on—training gliders.
Despite graduating almost 350 students a year who head directly for pilot training, the academy had no formal aviation program until just last year. That’s when a group of highly motivated upperclassmen (students are called midshipmen) decided something needed to be done about the lack of aviation at the academy, and they organized a robust soaring program.
What began in the summer of 2009 as a small group of midshipmen and a faculty advisor who camped at the airport to support the operation grew into a club that instructed more than 400 students in the joys of soaring last summer, and which the midshipmen and recently commissioned ensigns hope will find a place as an academic-year regular activity in the future. The soaring program is not unlike many of the other summer programs at the academy. Some are mandatory; others are voluntary. Midshipmen will get the opportunity to experience a submarine, the basics of seamanship, and more. But until last summer, there was no way for the midshipmen to experience aviation, the area in which the largest number of academy graduates will spend their careers. That’s one of the many reasons academic advisor Brian Randall and the ensigns and midshipmen started the program.
“We give them a taste of what being under instruction in an airplane is like,” said Ensign Josh Mann, a recent graduate who served as the director of operations last summer. Midshipmen get a taste of ground school and the glider during the two-week program. Each participant gets two flights in the glider, which gives them just a feel for what it’s like. The ensigns and a few upperclassmen run the entire operation, while Randall often just supervises from afar. “They’ll call me at the end of the day and say we did this many sorties,” he said. Otherwise, the midshipmen and ensigns are an independent bunch who love to fly and believe passing on aviation to the midshipmen is important.
Getting to the point of doing almost 1,000 flights in one summer hasn’t been easy. The school’s superintendent at the time, Vice Admiral Jeffrey Fowler, was a submariner, which meant that naturally his focus was on submarines. Far from embracing aviation at the academy, Fowler presented an obstacle the midshipmen had to overcome. To do so, they created a plan, including the operations details, who would run the program and how it would be run, and the costs. The fact they were able to do this with relatively little soaring experience among them was impressive. But considering they did so while also attending classes and the mandatory extracurricular activities of the academy was amazing. “Basically they cut us a check and said go do it,” Mann said.
Although the academy places great weight on the summer programs, cost was a driving factor behind the decision to allow the program. The Government Accountability Office estimates it costs U.S. taxpayers $1 million to train each pilot in the military. “If just one pilot doesn’t wash out, this program will more than pay for itself,” Randall said. Mann is also passionate about this side of the mission. “We do everything we can to put out a better [pilot],” he said. “We’re really trying to build stick-and-rudder skills.”
The academy financially supported the club, but it wasn’t yet to the level where they could buy a towplane and gliders. At the Mid-Atlantic Soaring Association in Fairfield, Pennsylvania, they found a ready and willing partner. Like many clubs, Mid-Atlantic’s airplanes and pilots were mostly dormant during the week, so the academy’s soaring group was able to utilize them at a rate of dozens of flights a day.
But the academy still needed glider instructors to fly the sorties. For that they turned to upperclassmen. A few paid for the rating out of pocket just so they could support the program. Between paying for ratings out of pocket, 12-hour days, and long drives between the academy and Fairfield, why do the midshipmen do it?
“This is a program we own,” Mann said. “The weight is on our shoulders. It’s fun to get away from the academy and apply what we’ve learned there.” And that’s what the leaders of the program are doing—they’ve set a budget, developed a plan, executed it, and have been responsible for the outcome. In other words, they are experiencing every day what the academy took four years to develop. “These guys are running it like they’d run a squadron in the fleet,” Randall said. The leaders have even developed a series of continuity practices to ensure the program stays strong after the original founders are gone and flying fighters in the Navy. “We’re trying to make a self-licking lollipop here," Randall said.
The future looks good for the Naval Academy’s soaring program. Mann, Randall, and the other leaders believe they have put together a program that is self-sufficient. But they are looking to the future to see if midshipmen can get even more aviation experience. “We’d like to have something like the Air Force Academy, but at a fraction of the cost,” Randall said (see "Aviation at the Academies," right column). Mann said it’s a good taste of aviation, but they want to make it much bigger. “We want to take them fresh with no time to instructing by senior year.”
Even with future growth the group’s leadership had to get creative. As a result of some initial press, academy alumni reached out to help. Through the alumni and some other creative networking, the group was able to set up a non-profit association, which now owns three Blanik L-13 gliders and a Cessna 182 towplane. They’ve staged them at an airport much closer to the campus, and are ready to fly whenever the academy gives them the green light to do so. So although the midshipmen and other group leadership didn’t skirt academy rules, they were able to complete their mission in a creative way that allows the academy to continue its focus on academics and extracurricular activities, while allowing the midshipmen who dream of flying jets to soar with the eagles.
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