The Flying Squirrels: Youth Aviation Club Gives Kids Unique Chance to Fly Vintage Airplanes

Elijah Hall, 14, was nervous as he took a seat inside the tiny, two-seat airplane last week at Glenndale Airport. But the nerves didn’t come from being a passenger in the small 1940s-era, single-engine plane.

The nerves came from knowing that, for the first time in his life, he was going to be the one flying it.

But when Hall stepped out of the plane 45 minutes later after landing on the airport’s grass runway, his nerves had been replaced by an ear-to-ear grin – and a new goal to one day become a pilot.

“At first, it felt like a roller coaster, but once I got ahold of the controls, it felt fine,” he said.

And that day, Hall became a dedicated member of a local club called The Flying Squirrels.

Since the 1960s, the group has been teaching kids the ins and outs of aviation. It started as an Explorer post of the Boys Scouts, and in 1970, the club made Glenndale Airport its home base.

Airport owner Dale Etherington said he remembers when the Flying Squirrels started meeting at his airstrip, located at 3460 S. County Road 400 West. At the time, the club owned one airplane and kids helped pay for it by cutting and selling firewood, he said.

“It’s a good organization,” Etherington said. “Kids can learn to fly cheap. And once they learn to fly these older kinds of planes, they can go out and fly just about anything.”

But by around 2000, the club was about ready to permanently disband as a Boy Scout Explorer post.

That’s when Steve Cusick and Greg Lockwood decided to turn it into a nonprofit flying club for 14- to 18-year-old kids. The two took charge of the group and joined up with Flight Training Centers, a Kokomo-based piloting school, which sponsors the club. The local chapter of the Experimental Aircraft Association is also a partner.

The Flying Squirrels really took off about nine years ago, when Cusick and Lockwood developed a five-day summer program made up of volunteer instructors and pilots, who actually let kids in the cockpit to fly small, vintage aircraft such as a Champ, a Chief or a Stinson.

Since then, the club has evolved into the only youth aviation club in the state that actually lets its members fly. The summer program only costs $225, which is just enough to pay for the fuel for the aircrafts.

“It’s a pretty unique situation we’ve got here,” Cusick said.

And last week, that summer program once again kicked off at Glenndale airport, where 18 teenagers showed up to get a taste of flying.

While some students learned about weather and wind patterns, others headed out to the airstrip, where five volunteer pilots took kids up and put them behind the controls of the airplane.

One of those pilots was Jesse Clement. The 21-year-old just graduated from flight school at Western Michigan University, and also recently received his flight instructor license.

But before that, Clement had been a Flying Squirrel. He joined the club in 2016 for a chance to fly smaller vintage aircrafts, and it fueled his fire to become a pilot.

Now, Clement is back at the club for the first time as a volunteer flight instructor.

“It’s excellent,” he said. “It’s so much fun getting to see the kids where I was just a few years ago.”

Cusick, a retired Kokomo High School guidance counselor, said there have been a handful of Flying Squirrels who have gone on to become professional pilots, but the program isn’t just about putting kids on a career path. The main goal is simply to give kids some hands-on experience with aviation.

“Some kids take the program just to see if it’s something they’re interested in doing,” he said. “We’ve had lots of excitement from kids, but we’ve also had students discover they didn’t want to have anything to do with flying.”

Ollie Rosewell, a 14-year-old from Carmel, flew a plane for the first time during the summer program last week. He said it was great, but he didn’t know if it was enough for him to actually get his pilot’s license.

“I was pretty nervous, but it ended up being a lot easier than I thought,” Rosewell said. “I was surprised how much the plane can do the flying by itself.”

His dad, David, said he was thrilled to find a club like the Flying Squirrels to give his son a chance to actually get behind the controls and see if it’s something he might want to pursue.

“It’s fantastic,” he said. “You’ve got all these guys volunteering their time and their planes, and all they’re getting paid for is the fuel. It’s great for local kids to get into a plane at a cheap price.”

But the summer program isn’t just fun for the kids. Club leader Lockwood, a math teacher at Western High School who has a pilot’s license, said it’s a pretty great time for the instructors, too.

“I get excited to come out and teach these kids, because I know exactly how they feel,” he said. “They get out of the plane and they’re smiling. It’s a natural high they can get. I see those smiles, and I love it.”

But that fun is tempered by the reality of piloting. Lockwood said it can be a dangerous activity, and the ground courses that are part of the program ensure students understand the technical, and sometimes complicated, aspects of aviation.

“They get hooked on the flying, and then they realize there’s a lot of material you need to know,” he said. “This is just a starting point for everyone to get a taste of what it’s going to take.”

Cusick said besides the summer flight program, the club also meets once a month during the school year to discuss aviation and flying, or take special trips to places like Grissom Air Reserve Base to tour the control tower there.

But the biggest draw to the club is the chance to actually pilot a plane during the summer program.

And for Cusick, the thrill of seeing a kid fly for the first time is what keeps him going as one of the volunteer leaders of The Flying Squirrels.

“There’s a certain amount of joy that the instructors get out of this,” he said. “You get to see kids do something they’ve only dreamed about before. They go from playing with toy airplanes as a youngster to actually flying a real one. That’s pretty neat.”

Carson Gerber can be reached at 765-854-6739, [email protected] or on Twitter @carsongerber1.

Carson Gerber can be reached at 765-854-6739, [email protected] or on Twitter @carsongerber1.

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