Love, heartbreak, and the joy of flight

News helicopter pilot Michael Adrian's creation, Born to Fly, has garnered interest from a major Hollywood company provided he can raise the funds to produce demonstration recordings of several songs written for the show by Annette Tucker and Kathy Wakefield, a team well known in show biz as songwriters.

Adrian, whose Austin, Texas-based company “develops original creative properties for Hollywood, television, and musical stage production,” has plenty of experience spotting a good story that turns on flying. In addition to being a Hollywood veteran and member of the Directors Guild of America, he is a 10,000-hour helicopter pilot who flew traffic-and-news missions for radio and television stations in the Austin area.

With (as Shakespeare wrote) "one foot in sea and one on shore," Adrian knows how to marry his news sense with a taste for the dramatic. Asked about possible casting options, he coyly drops a famous name—sorry, I can’t share it, but stay tuned—before volunteering for public consumption that he is “having conversations with some major talents in casting a number of the different roles.”

Born to Fly is based on the love story of Mona, a young pilot working her way up the aviation ladder the hard way, and Will, a character based on another young working pilot Adrian knew around the airport from his news helicopter-flying days in the 1980s.

For Mona, doing it the hard way in the male-dominated industry meant flight instructing, parking airplanes as a “ramp hostess,” and night freight flying on an Austin-to-Dallas canceled-check delivery run. Along the way she meets and falls in love with a young FedEx pilot; in real life Adrian was on the airport scene as she struggled to make it all work out. “I marveled at her determination,” he said.

The story's juxtaposition of love’s heartbreak and the soaring joy of flying is rendered through the “up-tempo, passion-filled songs” that ponder Born to Fly’s wrenching question: “Should you give up your dream for love?”

Adrian told AOPA in a phone interview that three of Born to Fly’s songs have been produced, and he has launched a crowdfunding campaign continuing through April to raise $10,000 to record about five more.

If the prospective backer in Hollywood likes what it hears and gives a green light, “that would really throw it into high gear,” he said.

Adrian lost track of the real-life Mona for about 10 years before there was a brief reunion in 1996, when she was flying a Gulfstream jet.

Since then no word, but you never know.

“I’d love for her to know what we’re doing, and I think she’d be flattered by it,” he said.

To see how you can help Born to Fly reach its $10,000 goal by April 30, visit www.borntoflymusical.net.