EAA Sport Aviation

You are free, free to fly wherever you want to go. The clouds are no longer an untouchable mystery, distant places are sud- denly closer, mountains or rivers are now easily passable and, once airborne, all of your earthbound worries are gone.

That vision played in my mind over and over again as I recovered. I had known for years that I would someday fly, and yet for those many years I continued to find every excuse not to fly. These excuses kept me from touching the sky until it was almost too late. A sickness had me bedridden to the point that I had many regrets, and one of them was that I didn’t fly when I had the chance. Day after day I’d say the same thing to myself: “I am a pilot,” I whispered quietly. “I am a pilot.”

A MISSION

If you know me now, you would never suspect that I was so far away from that dream, but I once was—and at that time, it seemed improbable to everyone but me. I hung on to that vision through some very dark times as over and over again I would fly to far off places in my mind. Taking the stick, I would climb into the clouds, fly over oceans and mountains, and even land perfectly on amazing surfaces. Those visions led me to a calling from the sky that became very clear to me as something that I needed to fulfill: to fly an aircraft into all 50 states.

So began The Flight for the Human Spirit, a project that seemed
far beyond my capabilities and pulled at every fear that I could pos-
sibly come up with. But it was a project that had the potential of
reaching so many lives at a time when there was so much negativity
in the news. I had heard about a new class of aircraft that was being
introduced called light-sport aircraft, and it seemed to be a perfect
fit. By the time that I began training, they had been in the market-
place for about five years. Jeff Mountain, the president of my EAA
chapter, told me of US Aviation Group in Denton, Texas, which had a
great flight school and reputation in the community. My wife,
Michele, and I went over there that day and sat in a few light-sports.
They were roomy enough, well laid out, and just sitting in the seat
stirred the soul. It was on that day in November of 2008 that I
realized that this dream of flight was des-
tined to become a reality.

PLANNING

It took the better part of a year to plan the
trip. Each time that I sat down to calculate
the next flight day, the miles and stops
increased. The final schedule had 140 stops
and 19,400 miles. Not only would it end up
becoming an epic adventure, but also I knew
that it would test my new piloting skills in
ways that I could only imagine. Overall we
had one simple message and goal: To reach
20 million people with this flight and tell
them that it is “Never ever too late to follow
your dreams.”
The aircraft of choice was a REMOS GX
powered by a Rotax 912. It is all carbon fiber
with the Aviator II package, which included
the Dynon D- 100 electronic flight instru-
ment system, Dynon D- 120 engine
monitoring system, two radios, a transpon-
der, and GPS with weather radar. We added
a ballistic parachute and an autopilot system,
along with a nice complement of electronics
and safety devices. This type of flight had
not been accomplished in a light-sport air-
craft before, so I enlisted the help of many
pilots and suppliers in determining the best
and most effective configuration for this mis-
sion. We unveiled the REMOS in June 2009