After a popular program was grounded for a couple of years, a Timmins group is working to get youth in the air again.
Last year saw the return of the Young Eagles program, with the event taking to the skies again this year. While the one-day event to introduce youth ages eight to 17 years was sceduled for this weekend, the weather forecast has postponed it. The Timmins Flying Club hopes to announce a new date in the coming days.
The Young Eagles program has been introducing young people to the world of aviation for 30 years.
“We promote aviation in general whether it be private pilots, commercial pilots, recreational pilots, mechanics, ramp attendants, any career in aviation,” says Noel Belair, a member of the Timmins Flying Club and the co-ordinator of the Young Eagles program.
“We honestly believe in it and we try to promote the industry because there’s a lot of bodies missing. We’re hoping that by enticing people back to the aviation industry that we can grow our group all over again,” he says.
“Pilots get together and we offer our time and our airplanes to be able to give the freedom of flight to these young adults between the ages of eight and 17.”
Young Eagles was brought to Timmins by Lloyd Richards in 1992, and it was the first time a program like this was offered in Ontario. Every year on Young Eagles Day, pilots from Timmins and from the surrounding area donate their time and their planes to take dozens of kids on 20-minute flights.
Belair is one of the pilots who will be taking off this year, and is a retired supervisor for the City of Timmins Waterworks Division, where he worked for 34 years. He began flying toward his own private pilot license about seven years ago, and has now spent around 170 hours in the air.
“I was fortunate to go on a trip with Lloyd Richards and Stan Makuch in 2011, when we flew over to Michigan for a pilot convention for the weekend,” Belair says.
“I was amazed at how far we could get in so little time and at the beauty of flying, not at 30,000 feet but anywhere from three thousand to seven thousand feet. To be able to see our country from that point of view enticed me to move forward with getting my own private pilot license in 2018,” he says.
During the early days of the pandemic and after the passing of several members of the flying club, including their founder Lloyd Richards, the program was forced to take a hiatus that lasted several years. Belair, who took on the task of getting the program off the ground in 2023, is coordinating the effort again this year — and it’s a pretty sizable effort.
“We don’t want to overwhelm ourselves and as much as I’d like to take 150 kids, it just doesn’t make sense,” Belair says. Last year’s event saw 50 kids take to the skies and with the extra planes this year, they managed to expand their sign-ups to 70 participants.
“When you get to that 71st child that comes in and wants to register and I have to say no, it’s heartbreaking to me. But I can’t do it,” he says.
The response to Young Eagles and the flying club has been huge, he says — the club’s booth at the annual Sportsman Show last year was so popular that they had to book four booths this year, and registration for Young Eagles was already full in less than a day.
“There’s people that ask why we don’t do this two or three times a year, but obviously there’s time, there’s money, there’s volunteers, there’s safety and what’s happening at the airport, there’s weather, so there are a lot of variables that could make this not happen,” Belair says.
“COVID and losing a couple of our members has put a strain on our group, so just the rebirth and having this comeback with the Young Eagles was hard to do. We don’t have a lot of members so with this, we’d like to recruit some members that maybe don’t want to be a pilot, but just have an interest in aviation. If we could grow our group and maybe double its size over the next couple years, just imagine the difference we could make,” he says.
“I’d like to possibly have another Young Eagles weekend or just an open airport night when people can come out and look at the airplanes, stuff like that. I would love to be able to keep doing it, but there’s only so much I can do with the amount of people I have right now.”
The one-day event is costly to run, but Belair says that many local businesses have stepped up to sponsor the initiative or support it in other ways because they know what a great cause it is.
“I’m retired so I’m able to give back as I have in the past, but in a different manner. And with Young Eagles, seeing the smiles of not just the kids but the parents that do attend, and seeing an interest in it, it makes a big difference,” Belair says.
There are other logistics to consider besides money. If an airplane breaks down, then the others have to make up the difference. If a pilot falls ill, someone else has to step in to cover their flights. If the weather goes bad, they have to postpone for the day, and if it’s bad all weekend, they have to cancel entirely and try to reschedule for a later date.
But they’ve been lucky so far and have never had to cancel it (“fingers crossed,” Belair says). Even last summer, when smoke from the wildfires in British Columbia was clouding the skies for the entire week before, there was a four-hour window of perfect weather that morning that allowed the event to move forward.
“When I landed with the last bunch of kids and we said we were done for the day, the winds picked up and it got cloudy all over again. It was like Lloyd was there watching and making sure this was gonna happen,” Belair says.
Flying is an expensive hobby, and obtaining a pilot license can run up to as much as $20,000, which is what makes this free experience so important.
It makes flying accessible to people who would otherwise not get the chance to try it out and form an interest. Belair says that several past participants have joined Air Cadets or gotten pilot licenses, and there are many kids who have returned year after year to fly again.
“Lloyd Richards was instrumental in our group and the aviation community, and something that he’s always said that always stuck in my mind is that if you drive a kilometre of road, you’ve driven a kilometre. But if you take off from the airport from a one kilometre runway, you can fly anywhere in the world,” Belair says.
“That one kilometre of airport runway opens up your eyes to the world. You can land anywhere.”
