Ian DeArmond doesn’t have a driver’s permit and cannot legally drive to school.
But if he really wanted to, he could fly there. By himself.
The 16-year-old Sapulpa High School student will be entering his junior year with something probably all of his friends won’t have: a student’s pilot license.
“He’s always liked planes, but he was afraid to go up,” his mother Karen DeArmond said during an interview with the Sapulpa Herald. On his 14th birthday, Karen’s brother Shawn took Ian up in his private plane. “He’s like, ‘we’re gonna just gonna go and if I can get him up we’ll go up, otherwise, we’ll just taxi the runway.’ Next thing I know, I’m getting a phone call that says, ‘get to Riverside, we’re coming in’ so I could watch them land.”
Ian says the thrill of taking off overcame his nervousness about it instantaneously.
“Once you go full throttle and you feel yourself getting pushed back into your seat, it’s like a feeling you never forget,” he said. “That’s my favorite part, still to this day. Once I felt that I was like, ‘yeah, this is cool.’”
Once he overcame his fear of heights, he was hooked. In August of 2021 he took his first flight lesson, and he continued training on and off over the next two years until he had logged enough flight hours to get his student’s license.
Surprisingly, getting to this point didn’t require hitting the books as much as it would to be, say, a commercial airline pilot, but Ian says he expects he’ll have to do more of that in the future.
“It really depends on the flight school,” he said. “My instructor takes you on your discovery flight and shows you, ‘this is how you fly,’ and then on your first landing, he helps you a lot, because it’s the hardest part.” Ian says it’s a lot like driving a car with an instructor—over time they will turn more and more control over to the student. “And when he feels that you’re comfortable, he’ll let you do your first solo flight.”
On June 15th, when Ian turned 16, he got to do just that. “You do three takeoffs and three landings around the pattern,” he said. After that, it’s almost old news. “Last Saturday, before the storms rolled through, I went up there and we flew around a little bit,” he said. “After I landed, he said ‘I’ll hop out now and you can fly a couple rounds by yourself.’ I can just do that, now,” he said, laughing.
Ian’s mom Karen says the first time he went up two years ago was his first plane ride ever. Despite the risk, she says she’s never been nervous about her son flying. “One, I know the instructor, and I just trust that God’s going to take care of him,” she said.
Ian’s instructor, Homer Woolslayer of Equinox Instruction, has trained not only Ian, but Ian’s uncle and many more. “He’s been flying since he was five,” Karen said. “He comes from a family of pilots.”
Karen said that Woolslayer was confident in Ian’s ability to fly well before he was actually allowed to. “He told me three weeks to a month before he did his solo flight that he could fly from here to Dallas; just not legally,” she said, chuckling.
A month later, and now Ian could fly to Dallas, and he could do it legally.
Ian says he’s not done learning, and he wants to make flying a career. “I have to do a cross-country solo flight. Anything more that 50 nautical miles,” he said. “My plan is to go to OSU and get my commercial license and fly for an airline.”
Until then, he says it’d be cool to put his flying to a more practical use. “I think it’d be cool to just fly around the United States, you know? Just explore the different states. The only bad thing is that fuel is very expensive right now.”
Even us non-pilots can relate. For now, fuel for a car is at about $3 a gallon, but fuel for a plane sits higher than $5 a gallon. High gas prices? Well, that’s something that just about everyone can relate to, regardless of how we get where we’re going.
