Earn your flybucks: Eagle Aviators youth club now accepting new members, offering a path to the skies for future pilots
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Teens who are interested in airplanes have an opportunity like no other in Eagle County — learn to become a pilot by earning “flybucks” for helping build a plane.
It’s all supported through Eagle County’s local EAA chapter, EAA 1689, and the Eagle Aviators, a local non-profit dedicated to teaching local kids the skills necessary for a career in aviation.
The groups have been meeting on Saturdays and will also meet on Tuesday and Thursdays this summer at the Signature Aviation maintenance hangar at the Eagle County Regional Airport. Their goal is to build a two-passenger Hatz biplane and a Rans 21 two-place high-wing airplane.
Kids who volunteer to help build the plane will earn credit — “flybucks,” they’re calling it — to receive flying instruction and aircraft rental up in the skies above Eagle County with a local instructor.
Those kids train on the Eagle Aviators’ simulator first, which is located on site at the hangar. Kids volunteering to help build the plane will also get to spend time at the nearby air traffic control tower and at the commercial airport, giving them an overview into all parts of the aviation industry. Every hour spent working in the shop goes towards the in-shop requirements necessary to become an airplane mechanic, as well.
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Hap Pool is the president of the local EAA chapter and one of most active participants in the weekly plane building sessions. To get involved, parents must contact Pool directly at 303-881-3223 or happool@gmail.com, and he will provide families with the proper waivers to operate tools in the mechanic’s shop and receive a free “Young Eagles” flight in the airplanes. Pool said parents are welcome to join their kids in the shop.
“It does seem to be a popular father-son or father-daughter activity,” Pool said, “especially for the 14 and 15-year-olds who can’t yet drive themselves to the shop.”
Pool is a licensed airframe and powerplant mechanic and donated many of his own tools to the shop. The shop also received donations from the local Home Depot, Costco and other local businesses.
Pool says he learned the aviation trade as a child by his father, who was an aircraft pilot in World War II. Pool’s father made it back from the war and was able to instill in him a love of flying, which he is now trying to pass on to the next generation through the Eagle Aviators and EAA Chapter 1689 out of Gypsum.
Through the EAA, kids in the program can receive the private pilot school documentation and test materials for the written portion of the pilot test.
“It’s ordinarily a $275 program,” Pool said, “but the EAA gives that to them for free.”
Pool said without the support of Signature Aviation, for donating the space in the hanger, and the EAA, for providing the bridge in the program from airplane mechanic work to actual flight training, the Eagle Aviators youth club wouldn’t be what it is. But there are also a lot of other donors and volunteers who help make the program possible.
George Saunders runs the glider program for the Eagle Aviators, teaching kids to fly the lightweight glider during the summer months. Flybucks earned while building the airplanes can be applied toward glider lessons, as well.
Saunders said before moving to Eagle County, he was part of a glider club in Indiana which helped him appreciate the peacefulness of soaring along naturally occurring air currents without the aid of an engine.
“They just gave so much to me, it made me want to give back,” Saunders said.
Before flying a plane themselves, kids are trained by Jim Crine in one of two simulator rooms, where they can learn on both the regular aircraft and the glider.
“The simulator has the same instrument panel that is in the airplane that they’re going to learn in,” Pool said. “They’ll learn how to land the plane and they’ll learn how to talk on the radio in these rooms first.”
The students then receive flying lessons from local instructor Taylor Seaton, who grew up in Eagle County and learned to fly with his father as a father-son activity to try out after his father retired.
Seaton, a former professional skier who learned to fly in his 30s, said he probably would have chosen a career in aviation much earlier if something like the Eagle Aviators youth program had been around when he was a kid.
“It’s a pretty amazing program,” Seaton said. “You can learn all sides of the aviation industry without leaving Eagle County, and it’s free.”
For more information, visit EagleAviators.org.
