(dramatic music) - From the dawn of mankind, we've always looked up, always looked at those birds, and looked at what's it like to just soar?

(dramatic music) - It's important to know our past because we learn from our past to make a better future.

(dramatic music) - Watching that video now that I made for UPS, it amazes me.

'Cause in that moment I thought of how could this ever happen to someone like me?

(gentle music) And I always thought that it'd be something that I have to wait till I'm older.

As soon as I got in the airplane, I realized that my dreams were a reality.

Watching it now, whenever I get discouraged, I always look back and, remember how I felt after that first flight.

There was something magical about it.

- So I'm gonna take my hands off.

You're flying.

(woman laughs) - I'm flying.

- I haven't touched the yoke in a minute & 30 seconds.

You've been flying the whole time.

You're a natural pilot.

- This is the best experience in my life.

- It's amazing, isn't it?

- I just feel like I could fly forever.

- (laughs) Yep.

I know the feeling.

- Can you help me land this?

- Yes.

(somber music) You made it, your first landing.

There are flights that are very special to a pilot.

The first one is today, your very first flight.

I have 18 years left until I retire.

You'll be 28.

Your goal is to fly my last flight with me in 18 years.

All right?

I really enjoyed flying with you today.

Special moment.

Don't cry.

It's a celebration.

(laughs) - I'm happy.

- You should be happy.

- And I just knew that this was who I was meant to be.

(somber music) - You know, I've had an opportunity to land at Bowman Field a number of times in antique vintage airplanes.

And it is such a treat.

It's a field that has been in operation since 1920.

So over a hundred years, this field has been in operation.

Today's world is basically new airports, newer airports.

So to find an airfield that is still being used today after over a hundred years, is a real treat for someone who loves history, vintage aviation and everything that America had developed in its road to today in the past.

- You can take a young Eagles flight as young as eight.

You can solo as young as 16.

Once you have the minimum 40 hours.

Then when you're 17 you can get your license and you go take your check ride.

So there are age limits.

- So don't panic, just fly the airplane.

Then we said there's urgencies, like your engine temps slowly rising and then your engine running a little rough.

And then we've got true emergencies like engine failure, engine fire, loss of pressurization.

We already said whenever we go fly, we're taking risks.

My name is Mohamud Aiden.

I was four years old when I came to the United States from Somalia, but my family fled in the 90s.

So my mom, my dad, and all my siblings, they all fled over to Kenya 'cause that's where they were accepting refugees.

And during that time, we made it to the refugee camp.

We stayed in the refugee camp up until 2004, where we got lucky.

We got drafted to come to the United States.

Life in Somalia for my parents, it was pretty tough.

It was rough and a war broke out.

And once the war broke out, everything was okay until they raided their town.

So it was the Somalians that were kind of invading.

So they're invading our people.

So we're Bantu, so we're the Somali Bantu tribe.

And so they invaded our town just killing, raping and all this other stuff.

And then at that point, a lot of people were just fleeing.

So it was in Kigali, Kenya where I was born in 2004.

- When I come here for class, we have a ground school class on Saturday mornings.

And it's really interesting because it's like, I found my people, I found people who understand that this is what we want to do with the rest of our lives and who are focused and driven.

And it's really just encouraging to see that I'm not the only one who wants this.

- The first airplane flight in Louisville was in 1910 at Churchill Downs.

When Glenn Curtis and his partner Bud Mars, brought their Pusher aircraft to Churchill Downs to fly off the racetrack.

The Pusher airplane is where the propeller is in the back.

And they did this for two days, dodging summer thunderstorms.

But they were the very first airplanes in Louisville.

Flying at this time was known as exhibition flying.

Basically it was flying.

If you wanted to see an airplane, you had to pay is basically what this was.

The first Wright exhibition team that came to Louisville was down at the old state fairground, and they operated off the racetrack and they had the very first air mail flights down there.

Now, the way they did this was the post office set up a small satellite postal station.

You would take the mail you wanted to go by air, they would mark it with a special mark, put it on the airplane.

The airplane would take off, fly around the fairgrounds land and then give it back to you.

So the mail didn't go very far, but it did fly.

(dramatic music) - Diamond 172, Romeo Bravo.

This is Boman Tower.

I see you're on final, you're clear to land runway 17.

- Something that I have noticed is that there's not a lot of women involved with aviation.

I think it's maybe 6% of people who fly are women.

They've really just blazed the trails for young people like me to be able to say, "Hey, I can be a pilot.

I can make it happen."

- I grew up on a farm working in the fields.

I would see an airplane fly over and I would watch the airplane from horizon to horizon.

- Flying the simulator with Jim Schroeder, something that I hear often about him is that he's the best pilot that there is.

He is investing in me and being able to learn so many things from him, being a veteran and being a UPS captain, it's just really inspiring.

It gives me a sense of safety and knowing that I'm gonna be okay because I've had good training from someone that has many hours in the air.

It makes me realize that, I'm gonna be okay when I get up there.

- There was a local airport, it was called Haps Airport, and I stopped and I asked the proprietor at that time, his name was Hap, I asked him, I said, "I'd like to take a flying lesson."

And he said, "Sure, no problem."

I'm sure everybody at that time stopped by and said that.

But anyway, a day or two later, I got with an instructor and I took my first ride in an airplane.

It was 1967.

Every day after work, I would stop by the airport and I'd take another lesson.

And in six hours, six hours of lessons.

At that time, I soloed.

When you take off and there's nobody sitting beside you, you're about 300 feet above the ground on the first takeoff.

And you're so excited, you're thinking, "Boy, this is really something."

I just love the idea of flying.

It was such an incredible feeling, and I'm trying to give it all back.

- In the early 90s, I had this flight school, Cardinal Wings, with my buddy Mark Loring.

We participated in a program called Young Eagles, and it's to give kids their first flight.

We had friends who had gotten in a little bit of trouble when we were in high school, and we had friends who were still getting in trouble.

I was in my early 20s and 1992 and had a good friend of mine die from a drug overdose.

I kept saying, "If he only flew airplanes, he wouldn't have been doing drugs."

So we started volunteering and donating our time and our aircraft to giving first flights to kids thinking that it might be an inspiration for kids.

It might be something life changing for them.

It might encourage them to do better in school, and it might encourage those kids to make better choices.

And I realize the teenagers need mentors.

Teenagers need mentors, and they also need to understand why it's relevant, why it's important to take mathematics, why they need calculus, why science is important.

Teenagers need to understand that the decisions that they make today will affect them for the rest of their lives.

- There was a drug smuggling plane abandoned here in 1979 that was flown in here from Lexington, where they had unloaded several crates of what was assumed to be marijuana.

A few hours later, they flew the plane in here to Bowman Field and just abandoned it.

That was flown by a guy named Thornton, who was an ex, he was an ex narcotics officer from Lexington and turned drug smuggler.

He was quite famous for a few years after he abandoned this plane here at Bowman Field, he was on another mission where he and a friend took a small Cessna and put it on autopilot, and they dropped some cocaine off in Georgia and then they bailed out of the plane and he was carrying 75 pounds of cocaine in a duffel bag along with several weapons and bulletproof vest.

And I think due to the added weight, his parachute malfunctioned and it never opened properly.

And he wound up falling to his death and they found his body in Tennessee, I think it was $4,500 in cash and gold Kruggerands, all the cocaine.

And before they jumped, they had dropped duffel bags of cocaine out of the plane, assuming, trying to get it to colleagues or else they intended to go back and pick it up.

And a black bear had found one of the bags and ate all the cocaine and died on an overdose.

They actually made a movie about the cocaine bear and that actually happened, and that was part of that abandoned drug plane.

- World War I was a time when aviation made great, great progress.

In fact, they say almost every six months you could see some sort of improvement in the military aircraft that were being used in World War I.

And after that, surplus military aircraft became available to the public.

And the one predominant airplane was the wonderful Curtis JN.

But people would say JN and kind of slur it.

Next thing you know, JN was coming out to sound like Jenny.

And that airplane got its name, Jenny, from then on.

The first Jennys were being sold for $2,500.

But as time went by, the price went down.

On July, 1919, some barnstormers from Indiana came to Louisville.

And for a couple of days in July, they set up shop and they hopped rides.

Louisville was totally overwhelmed by these barnstormers, people were just fascinated with airplanes.

They had read about airplanes in the newspaper all through World War I.

They'd read about the German Red Baron.

They'd read about Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, the American ace.

They had read about Frank Luke, the balloon buster who Luke Air Force base in Arizona is named for.

People were fascinated with airplanes.

They wanted to see airplanes, they wanted to ride in airplanes.

So now they had their chance.

- You know, I became interested in flying as a young boy.

My father was in the Army Air Corps.

(plane humming) That may be him now sweeping from down above.

I became interested in flying as a young lad, actually when I could walk, I wanted to fly.

My father was in the Army Air Corps, and I remember as just a toddler down in Virginia at the army airfield there going up and looking and watching those airplanes take off.

And from that day forward, I said, "This is something I wanna do."

(somber music) The 1929 Curtis Robin that sits behind me was mass produced by the Curtis Robertson Company out of St. Louis.

One of its principal participants was Charles Lindbergh.

He worked for the company that manufactured and he test flew the Robin.

It resembled a lot, the Spirit of St. Louis, which he flew across the Atlantic and made famous.

They were serviced by Curtis Air Stations, one of which is right in the heart of Louisville at Bowman Field.

Curtis Robin holds a number of world records.

It holds the world endurance record being time aloft without landing, almost a month.

It holds the world's barrel roll record over 452 consecutive barrel rolls.

And it also caught the attention of a guy by the name of Corrigan.

Corrigan was a young mechanic working on Charles Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis, the wings.

Became a pilot and a mechanic, and he purchased a Curtis Robin and started working on world records crossing America without stopping from San Diego to New York.

Did that several times.

And then he asked for permission to try to fly across the Atlantic.

It was denied, the permission, and he was very saddened by this.

He was given permission to fly from New York back to California.

So one morning when it was slightly foggy, he had enough clearance to take off and he did so early in the morning.

And he claimed that once he got above the clouds, his compass must have malfunctioned.

Because when he landed, he landed in Ireland, not in California.

He became quite a popular folk hero.

He's known as "Wrong Way" Corrigan, because to the very end of his life, he claimed that that compass just malfunctioned.

What's fascinating is that when he landed in Ireland and became quite the front page story, he had his license revoked by the forerunners of the FAA.

It took him two weeks to bring the airplane back, crossing by boat.

And when he arrived in New York, the two week suspension had ended, conveniently.

It said that when Corrigan returned to America and was met by a New York City ticker tape parade, that more people came out to wish him well than had wished Lindbergh well, when he returned from crossing the Atlantic for the first time.

Went on to write a book about it and a major movie was made about the incident which he starred in.

And so the airplane that was meant to introduce America to a new age of aviation captured imagination of America in a way that many thought unique and oftentimes amusing.

(engine revving) - You know, it's really phenomenal to be here at Bowman Field and to see where so much aviation history has taken place.

It's pretty amazing to be here.

It's a phenomenal place.

You can look around and see that it's very lively, lots of amazing aircraft, a lot of really good GA and... (airplane humming) (woman laughs) Aerobatic flying, especially air shows, it definitely is a form of art.

You referenced what I was doing on the ground, and that's preparation for the flight.

I have a set, a choreographed sequence, if you will, of specific maneuvers that I will fly and every maneuver I plan on where I want to position it within the airspace that I'm supposed to fly.

And so as I'm walking through, I'm visualizing my target altitudes, my air speeds, my aiming points where I want everything to be positioned.

And if I get a little bit out of position, how I compensate for that.

We actually call it, aresti is the terminology that we use, it's like a language of aerobatic figures.

And it looks kind of like hieroglyphics.

(laughs) So if you would, look, I have a card in front of me in the airplane, and that's the sequence that I fly.

And so beforehand that aresti dance that we call it.

I basically use my hands as if it's the airplane.

And I imagine when I pull vertical and I'm looking, I'll move my head, that's exactly where I'm gonna look when I get here.

And then I'm gonna roll and I imagine myself rolling and humming over in a loop and setting a line down and the rolling on the lines.

And so it's a visualization.

I'm using my hands to act as the airplane as I go through the sequence.

Last year I was the US National Advanced Aerobatic Champion.

They don't separate the genders.

26 pilots.

So I beat a whole lot of boys.

(laughs) I grew up on a ranch in North Central Montana, and I was raised by my grandparents.

My grandfather, in addition to being a rancher and a farmer, was also crop duster.

So I grew up with aviation.

He took me for my first airplane ride when I was about five days old.

And he taught me how to fly in a little piper, super cub, a little tail dragger on our grass strip in front of our house in Montana.

And I actually, I flew with him for quite a long time and graduated high school, went off to college, had a career.

And it actually wasn't until 2017 that I finally got my pilot certificate.

So I actually haven't officially been flying for that long.

Aerobatic flights, honestly, I can handle about 20 minutes at a time.

It's pretty physically and both physically and mentally exhausting.

Most of my flights, I didn't check the G meter today, but most of my competition flights, I'm usually at about between nine and 10Gs positive and minus -8Gs.

I try, I aim to be a role model and inspiration for female pilots or aspiring female pilots, for all pilots really.

But yes, it's, especially women in aviation, there's a lot of opportunities.

Lots more scholarships, things like social media even, whether you love it or hate it, it's really, I think helping women and young women, even middle-aged women, see that it's achievable.

It's not so far out of reach.

It's great.

There's definitely more female pilots coming up the ranks and it's so encouraging to see.

It makes me happy.

(upbeat music) (dramatic music) - Definitely from the start you always hear women in aviation, it's kind of low in numbers and so forth.

It's not prevalent, but I'm a bit lucky.

I might be a bit biased.

I got to grow up one on a field that we had so many women pilots around, so many women mentors.

My first ground school class was essentially all women.

So I kind of got a rare experience of feeling like it was all women power around here.

I know that's not the norm and not everyone gets to experience that.

(somber music) - Then there was the women aviators, the famous women aviators, and I think the one that mostly stands out in mind was Ruth Nichols.

She was flying a beautiful Lockheed Vega and she was being sponsored by Powel Crosley out of Cincinnati.

Powel Crosley was a millionaire.

He owned WLW radio station and he was making radios and selling those all across the country.

Ruth Nichols, in October of 1931, established a flight record of nearly 2000 miles from Oakland, California to Louisville.

The next morning she got up, when she started up her airplane it caught fire.

It didn't destroy the airplane, but it disabled it to the point where she had to stop the rest of her intended flight.

- In 1985, I soloed for the first time in a little Cessna 150.

And it was such a transformative experience.

I knew, I knew that I was in the right place and that aviation was going be my career.

I really love flying all airplanes, hot air balloons, single engine airplanes, jet aircraft.

I started flying the Challenger jet in 2000.

I flew that jet for Toyota and I worked a little bit for Hallmark Entertainment, which was really great.

If you ask me my favorite airplane, it's whatever airplane I'm flying at the moment.

- Then there's the great mystery story, we all know about Amelia Earhart.

She did come to Louisville in 1935 to speak at Memorial Auditorium, but she came by a train.

But there's one of these airport rumors, one of these airport stories that she came late one night, didn't wanna wait for a cab to go downtown to get a hotel.

So she just spent the night right here at Bowman Field, got up in the morning and flew away.

(somber music) - Get into the seat position, crouch on the seat.

You're gonna lean over the side and then dive right at the trailing edge of the wing.

- Okay.

- You might hit it on the way out, but you're gonna fall right off of it.

- Okay.

- But what I don't want you to do is try to dive back behind the wing, and then you have the risk of getting hit by the tail.

- Okay.

- So count two potatoes, and then find that D-ring and pull.

- Okay.

- All right?

(somber music) - 45-4 Roger, (indistinct).

(somber music) (indistinct) - (indistinct) is approved at the approach on (indistinct) clear to land.

- 24 approach (indistinct).

(plane hums) - Well, during the 1930s, of course, the Great Depression set in and many, many people were out of jobs, had little income, couldn't afford to go to the movies or the ballpark.

So they came to Bowman Field, it was called Depression Era Entertainment.

They would line the fences to watch the airplanes.

You could look in the Sunday newspaper for the airline schedules and know when the airplanes were coming and going, and be here to watch 'em take off and land.

And they would stay here even after dark.

The fence rows would be lined with people just can't wait to watch airplanes taken off and landing.

Bowman Field did very well during the depression, considering what the other part of the country was doing.

But of course, we know that war clouds were in the making.

World War II started in Europe in September, 1939.

People begin to see that some way or other the United States was gonna get involved.

And as time went on, the United States began to prepare for World War II.

And one of the things that they did, the government stepped in and bought property to east side of Bowman Field and began to construct what would become a military base.

Different bomber groups came here and trained using the bomb range down at Fort Knox.

And there was three important things went on here during World War II.

One was the troop carrier operations.

The other thing was, was the combat glider training that went on here at Bowman Field.

The helicopter was a new invention.

It was small, couldn't carry very much weight, but we know when an airborne division went into combat, they had to take a lot of cargo.

So a glider was a perfect, perfect type of aircraft to do that.

The glider would be towed into combat by a troop transport airplane.

Once it got into the combat area, the glider would be cast off, it would glide into a landing.

The nose would open up and the Jeep could drive out or they could carry a dozen troops in their equipment.

(somber music) Probably Bowman's biggest claim to fame in World War II, and that was the flight nurses.

This was the only airfield, the only military airfield, the United States Army Air Forces from 1942 to 1944 to train the flight nurses.

And the flight nurses were all graduate nurses, were members of the army.

They came here to learn skills of medical evacuation.

The idea was if you took a wounded soldier off the battlefield and got him to a modern hospital as quickly as possible, there was a good chance that he could survive his injuries or his wounds, just support them while they were in the air.

And there was over 2000 flight nurses that trained here at Bowman Field from 1942 to 1944.

(somber music) (dramatic music) - There have been some difficulties, not necessarily difficulties, but it's been a learning curve of how to balance my schoolwork, social life and flying.

But I wanna fly more than anything.

Clear.

(engine revs) There we go.

- The only thing was just make sure you say clear front, right before stand up, letting that you're good.

- There's times where you know, the student comes ready to solo, you know, and you as the instructor, it's your final authority.

You know, because they're flying under your certificate number.

So until they become certificated pilots, you're responsible.

It's a great feeling just when finally the light bulb comes on for the student, you have done your job.

(engine revving) - (laughs) Okay.

Okay.

Hold on.

I can say it better.

Okay.

When I get my license, I would like to fly to Mexico because I have Hispanic heritage there.

And, it's always interesting to me to see where I come from.

(airplane hums) (somber music) (plane hums) - Head forward, head forward.

(indistinct) (somber music) - Bowman's in a neat, neat situation 'cause it has this rich history.

There's a lot of pilots in this region because of the UPS International Hub.

There's a lot of civilian, other people that just like to fly.

Bowman is really unique because it's a historic airport, but it's right here in this neighborhood.

There's houses, except for the golf course on the east side, there's houses all the way around and most communities will not put up with that.

The noise, the airplanes coming and going all times of the day.

But the local community really seems to support it.

It's really a part of the community.

So it has a lot of active pilots, but the community unlike other locations around the country, they support it.

They kinda like it.

It's part of Louisville.

- When I was a kid, I got my first airplane flight at Bowman Field.

Back then, it was either a penny or 2 cents a pound.

So they would put you on a scale and weigh you.

The plane went up and made a loop and landed.

So I guess we were maybe up in the air for three or four or five minutes, but it was an incredible sensation.

So there was definitely a certain time when I was younger, it seemed like crashes were gonna happen almost every year over there, either in our neighborhood or around the neighborhood or in a different neighborhood on a different side of the airport.

(upbeat music) - Jenny came out of the earliest days of aviation.

I think most people realized the Wrights created controled flight in 1903.

About that same time, there was another fellow by the name Glenn Curtis, who also was a bicycle builder who also loved engines and who also loved flight.

He tried to sell his engines to the Wrights, but they didn't want it.

They want to build their own.

and those days they were pusher airplanes.

This is kind of important in the development of aviation, like any American entrepreneurial story, and this is where it goes outside of aviation.

If you're gonna build a widget, you're gonna build whatever you're gonna build.

You know, you have to have somebody who's gonna be the purchaser, the buyer of whatever it is that you're making.

So in aviation, in those early days since nobody had flown, you have to imagine a world where there were no airplanes at all.

There's nothing but the birds up there.

And now suddenly these couple people bring these old, very fragile wooden and fabric airplanes with a metal engine on the back pushing them through the sky.

So who's gonna be their first buyers?

Well, the military of course, because, the military wants to stay on top of it, and the military had long used balloons and things.

So they, both the Wrights and Curtis, just prior to the building of the Jenny, this is how they sold pusher airplanes, the Wright Flyer and the Curtis pusher to the military.

In the course of a few years, they've sold probably 35 of these things, half of them were crashed and of the half that crashed, they had equally as many deaths.

So the military said, "Hold on, maybe aviation's time is not right."

He said, well, why would there be a problem?

Why would they continue on?

The crashes were at slow speeds, but the engine was behind them.

So the pilots were crushed, even though they may only going 30 or 35 miles an hour.

So the military says, we're gonna cancel our contracts until you get this worked out.

Well, Curtis was a very, very savvy man, and he immediately got on a boat, went to Europe, and he saw in practice the creation of what's called a tractor style aircraft.

Tractor, because it's not a tractor as we know today, but it's a tractor as an engine that is in the front of the for airframe and it pulls the airplane behind it.

The big advantage to that is that the pilot's sitting behind the engine so that when there's a crash, the pilot is not gonna be crushed by the engine.

Now, he may have some other malady, you know, he may fall out of the tree if he crashed in a tree or something, but it won't be because of the way that airplanes were built at the time.

In my own instance, I've had a number of these off field landings, opportunities to find a way to bring the airplane down without hurting or damaging people, property, the airplane and the crew.

So all those things kind of in that order are part of the process of keeping an eye out as you're traveling.

And our airplane traveled, our journey traveled across country.

It's the only one in the country that traveled regularly across country so that there was more opportunity for things to go wrong.

Of the five remaining Jennys that are flying today, they all fly within the distance of the airfield, so that if something goes wrong with the engine they can bring it right down the airfield and get 'em fixed.

In my case, I was fortunate enough that when I brought them down into oftentimes fields, a corn field, bean field, or a little wooded area, every one of those, I flew them out after the engine was repaired.

Well, the Jenny that our team has flown for 10 years had a catastrophic accident on its return from a very large military air show.

Went through, had a very successful show, and we're ready to bring it back.

Myself and my copilot finally had a window to depart Scott Air Force Base after the air show, and we did had three fuel stops, beautiful as always, trip in the Jenny as you cast your eyes past those large bi-wings, looking at a world that oftentimes hadn't changed in over a hundred years, seeing the same view that the early mail pilots and some of the early aviators had seen.

In today's world, when you're trained to fly, one of the first things of the many things that you're taught is how to prepare for an emergency landing.

Because even in today's airplanes, that's really hammered into you.

What do you do for emergency landing?

How do you make an emergency landing so that you will ensure safety for those below as well as for yourself and your ship.

So with the Jenny, I'm always looking, I'm flown it for 10 years, all across the country, have had a number of these engine out landings.

So I had some experience, but what you don't have the experience of is where is it gonna happen?

So you might know how to configure yourself to find the safest place to land.

So in this case, I just refueled, our last refueling stop.

I was about 30 minutes from my home base and at about 1500 feet in the air, the engine just quit.

Just quit.

It was roaring like a lion and then just quit.

We are going over rural area, which was all woods and hills.

We were up in John Prine territory up near Muhlenberg County.

In fact, Paradise was just off our wingtips over there.

I saw a logging road, which had some clearing from the altitude I was at.

I knew we were going down, unless I could get it started.

It was trying to find the best place to get it in where I knew I could also, once we figured out what it is, get it out.

So there was a, like I said, small logging road with some clearing and woods next to it.

I started for that.

As I got a little closer, I noticed that there were stumps.

I didn't wanna lose the wings, you know, I could have sat down and lost the wings, didn't wanna do that.

There was a field to the right of it that looked suspect, but it was open and I didn't see tree stumps.

A big pile of trees, little further to the right.

So I said, I think I can put it down there.

So I brought it in and put it down with a light skip, everything's looking good.

And then when it came back down again, the landing gear caught in what I come to find out was a strip mine that had had some wheat planted on it.

So from the air it looked green and relatively level, but there with furrows and things that you couldn't see.

So it ripped the landing gear off and we came to a very, very quick stop.

(plane humming) (somber music) (engine humming) - What's your name?

- Taylor.

- Taylor, how old are you?

- Nine years old.

- You're nine years old, right?

Oh, Okay.

- I'll turn 10 in October.

- Oh, okay.

(indistinct) (group speaking in foreign language) So are you interested in air planes?

- Yes.

(somber music) - Once we got in the air and me not touching the controls for a minute and a half, there were periods of time where it would've been up to 10 minutes.

I hadn't touched anything.

And we were going up and down the Ohio River.

She's making turns, she's maintaining altitude that it was obvious to everybody.

She is going to make a great pilot someday.

(somber music) So the first time I officially met Taylor was the day that we flew together.

I had seen videos of her earlier.

We went part of a career day for Girls Aviation Day and interviewed dozens and dozens of young girls.

And later watching the tapes, it became absolutely clear who the front runner was.

And that was Taylor.

I think you saw that in the video.

How she comes across, her sense of confidence, what she knows about aviation, how it's in her soul.

So once I met Taylor at the airplane, the way I had approached it that day was I was gonna teach her to fly.

So we started walking around the airplane and I was talking about how an airplane flies.

The ailerons, we're looking at the flaps, the flight controls, and I'm walking through this, but I noticed that Taylor wasn't really listening to me, that she was just, she was taking her fingers and going down the airplane and she was really thinking about what was gonna happen that day.

And it was at that moment I realized that this is not about me trying to teach her, this is about letting her lead today, letting her experience this and me just kind of following her lead.

- Alright, Taylor, so based on the winds today, it favors Runway 33.

So how you gonna get to Runway 33?

- I'm gonna take via Charlie.

- Alright, sweet.

So we looked at the plane.

Plane looks good.

You got more than enough fuel.

Any questions for me today before you go?

- Nothing I can think of.

- All right, well good luck.

Make it happen.

Okay?

Dave, you got any words of advice for us before she takes off?

- Taylor, I am so proud of you.

This is such a great day to have you here and doing this and to be a part of it.

And one thing I want to add is you get out there today, trust your training.

You've got great instructors, you have great training.

You believe in yourself and throughout your career you're gonna have moments like this where there's gonna be pressure to do a flight, whether it's haul passengers, cargo, important things.

But in the end, always think safety first.

Make good choices.

You'll have a great career, have a lot of fun.

This is the beginning of a fantastic journey ahead.

I wanna wish you all the best.

Have fun.

- Thank you.

(engine revving) (dramatic music) (indistinct) (dramatic music) (somber music) - I was 18 years old at the time when I first soloed, when I was up in the air, I realized that, basically for the first time ever, I have my own life in my hands.

I am the only one who's going to get me on the ground.

I cannot rely on my instructor.

I can call up ATC and ask for help, but the actual person who's gonna land this airplane and guarantee my safety is me.

And that level of responsibility, I mean the power of the consequences in that moment were huge.

And it really left an impact on me to this day.

- My dad's cousin, Steve Russell was A7 pilot in Vietnam.

When we would get together at Christmas, my whole family would sit around as a family and go through those old Codec slideshows.

And Steve, who I ended up just calling Uncle Steve, he would bring these eight millimeter videos out of Vietnam.

And so he'd have all this footage with stuff coming up at him and bombs going off.

And I just thought that that was the coolest thing.

And so it was, that is when I knew I wanted to be a Navy pilot.

So that was really the cat's meow for me.

(plane hums) - Also the first solo was, it was a lot of emotions.

Excited, scared, surprised that the guy was gonna get outta the airplane, when he gets out you lose a lot of weight on the airplane so the airplane flies differently, lands a little bit differently.

So it was, especially for a teenager, that was a pretty, pretty exciting time.

- The moment when you first take off after your solo, that is definitely more when it hits you 'cause you know you're on the ground the whole time and you can maneuver the plane pretty easily without anyone in the plane.

But when you take off, the takeoff part isn't much.

But there's definitely a lot of chanting in my head.

"I can do it, I can do it."

- We used to live in the projects in West Louisville and when we lived there we lived on the approach end of the airport.

So planes would always be taking off and landing.

And I remember playing soccer with my friends.

I was about, yeah, I was about 10, 11 years old and I used to always stop, you know, in the middle of the soccer game.

I'd just look up and be like, man, you know, "Those are some pretty big airplanes.

They're pretty sweet.

One day I could probably see myself doing this."

- At the end of Taylor and my flight together, I asked her if she would like to accept the challenge of flying with me one day on my final flight.

And I'm happy to report that, here we are six and a half years later and she's living up to her end of the bargain.

She is learning to fly.

She's soloed an airplane, she's on her way and there's still a possibility that she and I will fly together one day at UPS.

(dramatic music) The whole thing is just magical.

(somber music) - When I solo, there might be some more tears of joy.