Pilots: A lava affair

On May 3, 2018, Scott Wilson, owner of Aloha Skies Aviation in Hilo, Hawaii, was at the airport when his phone buzzed. It was a County of Hawaii Civil Defense text message—an alert system about seismic and meteorological activity. The text stated that a fissure had opened in Leilani Estates, 17 nautical miles southeast of Hilo. Wilson hopped in his Cessna 172 and flew over to it, capturing photos of the small rip in the land within a half hour of its opening.

He returned to the airport and shared his photos, which showed an unassuming scratch of orange lava from which steam vented skyward. “Everyone said, ‘That’s it? No big deal,’” Wilson remembered. “But the geologists said, ‘Just wait. It’s only beginning.’”

They were right. Within days, 24 fissures opened, making headline news around the world and generating the busiest weeks Wilson’s flight school has ever seen as photographers converged on Hilo and sought out pilots to take them aloft. As the only fixed-wing general aviation operation on the eastern side of the island, Wilson and his Cessna 172 were in high demand. “When the lava got going, I was flying 5 a.m. to 7 p.m. every day. I couldn’t keep that up. I was coming home too tired, so eventually I cut back to starting at 8 a.m.,” he said.

The business was much needed. Wilson and his wife moved from Wisconsin to Hawaii in 2014. With a new instructor certificate and a great deal of optimism about beginning a flight instructing career, he approached the local flight school—the only flight school at Hilo International Airport—about a job but was told there wasn’t enough business to take on a new instructor. When the school went out of business in 2016, Wilson jumped in to fill the void. He bought a 172 and, with a monopoly on flight training at Hilo, waited for the students to come.

He learned quickly that it’s hard to make a living flight instructing on the Hilo side of the island. “There are very few people here with the money to take lessons,” Wilson said. “In two years, I’ve graduated five people. I’ve got just one student right now.” He looked into flying tours but discovered the state fees levied on tour operators make it prohibitively expensive. Most of his business comes from flying with mainland pilots who are visiting Hawaii and want to see the island by air.

He scraped by for two years. And then the lava began to spew.

Very quickly, Wilson began getting calls from photographers coming in from all corners of the globe. During May, June, and July, he flew them nearly continuously. “All the photographers I flew said they preferred fixed-wing over helicopters because there is less vibration,” said Wilson. “I flew someone from National Geographic, lots of pros with photography studios. I took out news photographers. One of the photos I took with my cellphone made the front page of the paper.”

The photos were stunning. Where the 24 fissures had opened, about six “kicked out huge amounts of lava,” said Wilson. “Fissure 8 made a lava fountain that spewed about 300 feet high at a rate of 26,000 gallons of lava per second. It flowed like a waterfall. We had to stay 3,000 feet up for the TFR but it didn’t matter, it was so massive.” The lava from this single fissure, Wilson added, flowed more than seven miles to the ocean, covering a width of 3.5 miles at the point of ocean entry. Seen from the air with the other lava-producing fissures, the sight was breathtaking.

Every pilot has a flight they’ll never forget—a journey that remains forever etched in memory. For Wilson, it was three months of flying this past summer that will stand out as his aviation highlight. “It was just incredible,” he said, awed. “Every time I went up, it was something different.”