Friday, July 5, 1996

Texas has no shortage of youthful flyers

By TERRY WALLACE
Associated Press

LANCASTER - They don't date yet. They don't shave yet. They certainly don't drive yet.

And technically, they don't have their wings yet. Federal rules won't allow that until they turn 17.

But what teen-agers like Amber Benson and Greg Johnson are doing is flying.

"In fact, there was a 9-year-old who came in the other Sunday," said Charito Hagad, owner of Precision Aviation at Hudson Airport, on the eastern edge of Mesquite.

"We had three years ago a lot of 11- and 12-year-olds taking flight school," said Bill Knight, owner of BK Aviation Services at Luck Field in far south Fort Worth. "I think the families wanted to challenge the kids and keep them away from undesirable friends."

There are 10,681 student pilots and 3,519 licensed pilots between the ages of 16 and 19, the Federal Aviation Administration reports. Of the young licensed pilots, the FAA counts 205 with commercial licenses.

However, the FAA has no statistics on student pilots younger than 16 since they don't meet the minimum age for solo flying.

Flyers must be at least 17 before they can obtain a private pilot's license and carry passengers. There is no age requirement, however, in federal rules or law for anyone to fly with an instructor along.
Like Jessica Dubroff.

There are few similarities between the 14-year-old Wilmer girl, the 14-year-old DeSoto boy and Jessica Dubroff, the 7-year-old San Francisco Bay-area girl killed with her father and flight instructor April 7 while trying to become the youngest person to fly across the United States.

Well, Amber did begin flying when she was 5 years old.

That was when her father, contractor and licensed pilot Jack Benson, first put Amber at the stick.

"Her father has been a pilot, and she's flown with him a lot and gotten interested," said John Irwin, flight instructor at Cardinal Aviation at Lancaster Airport, just south of Dallas. "Her father wants her to know what to do if something ever happens to him while they're flying."

For the first few years, she just kept the plane steady and on course, not executing any maneuvers until she began taking formal instruction at age 13.

"It came easy, it was exciting," said Amber, who now has about 22 hours of flying time to her credit.

However, Amber, a student-athlete at a private Christian academy, enjoys flying without seeking glorification from it.

For Greg, it's just a cool thing to do, something he's been doing since age 11.

"My brother was going to start flying, but he never did. He took like one lesson, but he's afraid of heights. So I did it," he said.

Greg is the only aviator in his family, and instructors were reluctant to take on a student so young.
Putting a pre-teen at the stick isn't the prescription for disaster that many people think, some instructors say. Flying a small plane is not equivalent to driving on a busy freeway, said Don Booth, owner of Grayson Flying Services at Grayson County Airport in Denison.

Critics of young aviators "don't realize that there are two sets of controls, one of them for the instructor. There aren't that many cars that have that. And there is nowhere near the amount of traffic in the air that you'd have on a highway," Booth said.

But Irwin has mixed feelings about students who take up flying too young.

"The younger students tend to have a lot better hand-eye coordination, but they don't have the cognitive powers," he said.

David Horton, president of Cothron Aviation at Arlington Municipal Airport, tends to agree. "The majority of kids don't have the maturity and psychological development.

"But the thing that scares a flight instructor isn't a child but an adult who freezes at the controls," Horton said. "It's a lot easier to seize control from a child than from a grown-up who has a white-knuckled grip on the controls."

The public horror over the Dubroff tragedy, and the girl's parents encouragement of her to seek the transcontinental flying age record, initially threatened to compel Congress and federal aviation officials to restrict or ban flying for anyone too young to certify for a license. But the fervor appears to have faded.

A bill sponsored by U.S. Rep. John Duncan, R-Tenn., chairman of the House Aviation subcommittee, would outlaw any flight record attempts by anyone younger than age 17, too young to hold a pilot's license.

The House Transportation Committee has approved the measure and sent it on to the full House, which is expected to add its approval by the end of July, said subcommittee staffer Jim Coon.
The bill, which has Clinton administration support, may become law by the end of the year, Coon said.

Amber understands the logic behind the bill. At the same time, she does not believe teen-agers should be denied the opportunity to fly with an instructor.

"I can understand if they'd be worried about somebody who was 4 years old just deciding to come in and take a flight lesson," she said. "But somebody who has the intelligence level to understand it I think should be allowed to - somebody like 11, 12, 13 and on up."