Flying at Edwards Just for Personal Fun
Saturday, May 19th, 2007
By Pierre A. Kandorfer
Edwards, CA – Here at Edwards Air Force Base, flying airplanes is a way of life. Many of Airforce’s and NASA’s top pilots fly here day and night, 365 days a year– for living. However, there are people at Edwards who love to fly just for fun, their personal fun. The Edwards Aero Club gives them the opportunity to do just that. Conveniently and inexpensively.
As the club manager Doug Botbyl explains, they have currently about one hundred sixty active members, all of them somehow affiliated with the military. In order to be eligible in the Aero Club, you must be either on active duty or retired from it. Airforce Reserve members, however, as well as civilian defense employees and contractors and their families are eligible also. Interestingly, more and more female pilots and students are joining the club. Why? Nobody really knows.
Why joining an Aero Club within the base instead of buying an own little plane or renting one commercially in Lancaster? First of all, for many club members it is much more convenient to have the opportunity to fly “next door” to the place where they work. And secondly, the club offers excellent, late-model airplanes at a very competitive price. This despite the modest thirty dollars initiation fee and twenty five bucks monthly charge.
The organization is an “official Edwards Aero Club and Flight Training Center” but uses not tax dollars at all. The club must earn all the operational budget to spend, including salaries for two full-time employees and contractors.
Specially attractive is this program for all people who are interested in learning to fly. With six flight instructors, two of them full-time contractors, the club is larger than most smaller type of flight schools. Steve Barron of Lancaster retired from the Air Force and uses the club for his initial flight training to become a “private pilot”.
One club member, who is on active Air Force duty and does not want to be named, but wants to add the fact being a pilot to his resume. “It is a good career credential and let’s me understand the aviation much better.”
The program starts with a state-of-the art, computer-based and FAA approved ground school. No more one on one teaching, no more traditional “class room”. Just a comprehensive, very elaborate audio-visual program on a dozens of CD’s you can take with you home and learn at your convenience. Your learning progress is being documented, and the flight instructor only has to evaluate the progress, answer questions, and sign-off the student for the next step. Price tag for the ground school: 299 dollars.
Doug Botbyl: ”With this program, you are able to show your family on a DVD exactly what you are doing in a plane and how to cope with specific situations. This reduces the far of flying some people have tremendously….”
The Aero Club is an official “Cessna Center”, and it shows. The study material is excellent! No more theoretical explanations of flying techniques, no more boring two-dimensional graphics to demonstrate specific piloting procedures. Excellent DVD-type of video presentations instead, showing every single step or move you have to do – before you even enter the plane for the first time.
The club owns seven singe-engine planes. As a main work horse, they are using the most widely build plane of all times, the Cessna 172. Four of them. Additionally, they own a high-performance Cessna 182 with a retractable gear to be used for the more advanced training such as a commercial or ATP (airline transport) license. A Socata TB200 and the legendary T-34 Air Force trainer are available too.
The maintenance of the planes is above the average also. The club owns a hangar with a well-equipped maintenance shop. Glenn Eppich from California City, a private pilot himself and a FAA licensed “airframe and power plant” mechanic, runs the shop. An additional technician helps him out.
The club enjoys lots of tarmac space at the historical “South Base” place. The best of all, it is able to use its “virtually own” runway, the very same one Chuck Yeager used for his supersonic flight many decades ago. This “little runway” 24/06 is now outdated and much too small for the general Edwards air traffic, but a perfect solution for a flight club and school.
The facilities consist of a very roomy trailer with office space, class room type of arrangement and other necessary facilities needed for a flight school and club – and a sizeable hangar. Here, the maintenance shop, storage room, a computerized FAA-Test Center and additional office is located. In front of these buildings, there is more tie-down space for airplanes they can ever utilize.
The Club is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The only “problem” is how and when to fly in a totally restricted military air space such as Edwards AFB. First of all, all participants are somehow directly or indirectly connected with the DOD and have the necessary security clearance. Secondly, the club is using specific arrival and departure procedures in and out of the restricted airspace, mostly at a specific altitude and predefined pattern.
It helps dramatically to be able to use a different runway than the big Airforce guys. The club planes use the same kind of civilian registration numbers, beginning with the letter “N”, but the Air Traffic Control knows automatically that these numbers are actually registered to the Air Force.
For most of the club members, flying at the 300,000 acres huge Edwards AFB is a very special thing. Here, big portions of America’s aerospace history has been and is still being made. From the very first rocket-powered flights – to countless world records broken and still being held at the very same place. Flying at and over Edwards just for sake of the own, personal fun – you can’t beat that….