Around the Patch

The author's daughter enjoying a flight as a small child. A decade later, she got a fresh taste of aviation at a Young Eagles rally.

There’s a photo I treasure of my daughter when she was about 4 years old. She is sitting in the right seat of a friend’s airplane with hands on the yoke and a smile on her face. Out the window behind her, the ground is far below. I was looking at this picture the other day, wondering how this little girl got to be nearly 14 years old and taller than me, when it suddenly hit me: When was the last time she flew? Or for that matter, when was the last time I took her to the local airport?

About the time of this revelation, I was asked to help at a Young Eagles rally. The Young Eagles is the Experimental Aircraft Association’s brilliant approach to introducing young people to aviation. Volunteer pilots take children ages 8 to 17 for a free 20-minute flight, giving countless kids their first airplane ride. Since 1992, volunteers have given nearly 2 million of these flights.

Prior to flying, Young Eagles and volunteer pilots do a walkaround of a parked airplane to learn about preflight inspections, the key parts of an airplane, and how these contraptions stay in the air. As a ground instructor, I was tapped to run one of the walkaround stations. The timing couldn’t have been better. It was the perfect opportunity to get my children back to the airport.

Except they weren’t as enthusiastic about it as I was. The idea of waking up at oh-dark-30 on a Saturday and driving for more than an hour to the Payson, Arizona, airport did not thrill them. Nor did the idea of listening to mom ramble on about airplane parts and the forces of flight. But they like physics and free doughnuts, so I was optimistic all would be well.

We arrived at the airport in ideal flying conditions: cool and cloudless with hardly a breath of wind. The organizer directed us to a nearby Cessna 150, and soon the first pack of young fliers arrived for their preflight. As I did the briefing, Emma and Ben hung at the back, listening. After three or four of these briefings, I could see their eyes starting to glaze over and the grass behind the airplane beginning to look a lot more interesting to them than rudders and spinners. Anxious to engage them, I threw out a challenge: “Hey, guys, you want to do the next briefing?”

There’s an adage that the best way to learn something is to teach it. Suddenly, they had questions: Tell me again how the elevator works? What’s that weird French word for the moveable surfaces at the back of the wing? What is this tube sticking out the front of the wing again? They briefed. When they got stuck, they turned to me for help, and then got it right for the next group. They quickly devised a system where one would teach and the other would move the appropriate controls from the cockpit.

I noticed during my briefings that although some youngsters did seem truly interested in the airplane, most had simply endured me as a necessary speed bump on the way to their flight. With Emma and Ben, the dynamic changed. Here were people they could relate to. It’s one thing to learn about airplanes from a boring adult; it’s another thing to learn from your peers.

While I can’t say my children are now avid fans of aviation, we definitely took a step in the right direction that morning. “That was fun,” they admitted on the drive home. “Can we do it again next year?”