Getting involved in aviation can be a difficult journey.
People might not know who to talk to and get started, and some people can be unsure if they even want to fly, Experimental Aircraft Association Cottonwood Chapter 952 member Chuck Losinski said.
But small airports are an ideal place to find out.
“It always starts, typically, with a flight with a local flight instructor at a local school,” he said. “That could be somebody like untethered aviation out of Sedona. They have two little airplanes. … It’s a good place to expose yourself to flying in little airplanes, and typically it’s called a discovery flight, and they’ve been going on forever.”
Most flight schools available near the Verde Valley are either Sedona, farther north in Flagstaff or farther south in Prescott.
“They all have different airplanes, some high wing, some low wing,” Losinski said. “Their instructors can be a 20-year-old kid who got his flight instructor rating independently just working with another flight instructor, or maybe graduated from Embry-Riddle [Aeronautical University].”
Like Elks lodges, EAA is an organization with chapters across the entire country. EAA chapters are focused on education.
“That’s a great way to get involved in the community, because a lot of these chapters, EAA chapters, emphasize the social aspect to just communing with one another, so to speak, or hangar flying so to speak, with aviation being the topic,” Losinski said.
A lot of the information about where people take lessons or how they got involved in aviation comes from conversations at those chapter meetings.
“If you come to the chapter meetings, usually we talk about things, we might have a speaker, but you might find out that we’re going to do a ground school,” member Brian Johnson said.
Cottonwood’s chapter meets on the first Tuesday of every month at 6 p.m. at the airport. Visit chapters.eaa.org/eaa952,
“We always have some body talking about something, … the last time there was an accident at Sedona.
And so then it … was big about checklists,” Johnson said, referring to the crash landing of a Cirrus SR22 aircraft on Nov. 3. The pilot and passenger suffered only minor injuries.
“Many local airports have smaller events. Many airports have a Wings and Wheels event including Sedona,” Losinski wrote in a later email.
Wickenburg hosts a free fly-in on Saturday, Jan. 17, complete with breakfast, from 9 a.m. to noon.
