After an array of nervous thoughts and doubts about being hurtled into the sky on a miniature aircraft, guidance counselor Courtney Gabriel harbored nothing but joy and astonishment after witnessing the beauty of flying with her pilot-in-the-making son, Aydan Gabriel.
On top of juggling the school struggles of being a junior, Aydan currently attends Griffith Airport’s flight programs in hopes of becoming a commercial pilot, a future he’s been passionate about since the beginning of his high school career.
“Over the summer, not this past summer, but the summer between his freshman and sophomore year, he went to this summer camp in Colorado for fourteen days,” Mrs. Gabriel said.
“He was in Colorado Springs, and he did an aeronautical summer camp. They did everything from flying planes, to helicopters, to skydiving. Anything aeronautical you can think of, he did. So, when he came back from that, at the beginning of his sophomore year, he knew that was his passion – that that’s exactly what he was going to do for the rest of his life.”
Aydan said that, at first, he wasn’t sure if he wanted to do piloting until his first flight.
“I thought it was going to be super difficult, and it wasn’t going to be as fun as I thought, but once I got in the air, it was even better than I thought it was going to be. Just keeping the level flight, learning the controls, the main stuff.”
Before operating an aircraft and going into the sky, Aydan had to attend what’s called “ground school”.
“It’s basically just studying like school – like bookwork and everything,” he said. “You just read a book and then you’ll get taught by a teacher in class and stuff. We discussed air traffic and flight instruments. We talked about the different air classes. Like the higher you go the higher the classes, so like the highest is A. We talked about what we’re supposed to say when we’re on a flight. The main thing was instruments and air traffic.”
Initially, Aydan struggled balancing schoolwork paired with his piloting.
“I was at the end of my school year, so it was difficult because I had just started finals and stuff,” Aydan said. “But then, over the summer I was able to take it. I didn’t really have anything going on except independent studying over the summer. So, it was a little hard, but it wasn’t too bad at all.”
Now that Aydan has finished with all of the coursework he did over summer, he looks forward to focusing on the actual flying aspect of piloting.
“At the moment, I’m flying with my instructor,” he said. “I’m flying a Warrior. It’s just a four-seater plane that has just one engine, but when I get older, I can get a different license to get different kinds of planes to fly.”
Every time Aydan goes into the sky, it costs large sums of money.
“Every time he flies a plane, it’s $450 at Griffith Airport,” Mrs. Gabriel said. “He has to accumulate 40 hours of flying before he can get his license. So it’s between his 40 hours and his 18 weeks of ground school. So, while he was going to school, he would leave school, and then on Tuesdays from 6-9pm, he’d go to ground school.”
Recently on one of his flights, Aydan took his mother, Mrs. Gabriel, into the sky with him. Although this wasn’t Aydan’s first flight, the idea of flying still made her nervous at first.
“But once he started doing all of the flight checks and flying, there were no nerves at all,” she said. “It was actually very exciting and fun. It was an exhilarating experience.”
While in the sky, she described the view as breathtaking, comparing it to being better than commercial flights.
“I think when you’re on a commercial flight, there’s other people around you, and so it’s distracting to focus on things,” she said. “But by being in a small aircraft, we were low enough to still see like cities and towns but high enough to enjoy flying. You also get the most beautiful sunsets.”
In the future, Aydan said, he looks towards furthering his interests at Purdue.
“I’d like to go on commercial piloting at Purdue, and possibly even go into engineering,” he said. “However, the main goal is commercial piloting.”
For anyone interested in aviation, Griffith Airport offers a variety of other flight programs for different pilot certifications.
“They have something called an exploratory flight at Griffith Airport where [students] can do an exploratory flight,” Mrs. Gabriel said. “It doesn’t cost them anything. They’ll go into the sky with an actual instructor and see if it’s something they really want to do. Some people obviously get sick when they’re in planes and things like that.”
