EAA Chapter 29 president Robert “Bob” Coverdill, EAA 862708, didn’t know the impact of how his action of passing the controls affected his right-seat passenger until he got this inspiring text message just a few days after flying together.
“I signed up for private lessons. I’m starting tomorrow!”
Chapter 29 member Sándor Pethes, EAA 1343492, was Bob’s right-seat passenger that day.
“I’ve always wanted to get a pilot license, and I actually tried to pursue it back in 2010,” Sándor said. “I did two flight lessons, and I just personally decided that I didn’t have enough time to dedicate to this and get it done right. So it kind of got put on the back burner, and then I met Rachel two years ago and she was heavily involved in EAA, so I started volunteering for Young Eagles as ground crew with her.”
Rachel Henderson, EAA 1225973, is Chapter 29’s Young Eagles program coordinator. She had been working toward her private pilot certificate for almost three years, and finally knocked it out last fall. Rachel’s achievement was a huge motivator for Sándor.
Sándor and Bob had been trying to schedule an Eagle flight for quite some time for Sándor to learn a few things from Bob, but their schedules never aligned.
One day, Bob, Rachel, and Sándor were traveling together to their sister chapter, Chapter 129 in Bloomington, Illinois, to help stage a Young Eagles event. On the way home, Bob decided to stage an impromptu Eagle flight for Sándor.
“Once we started taxiing, I had his hands and feet on the controls, and everything we did, he had a touch point on, right through take off,” Bob said. “We were climbing out, and I gave him the controls and I said, ‘All right, just keep the nose pointing up.’ I had him do a few maneuvers and he really took to it, he really had a good feel to it, and I had him on the controls right down to flare and touchdown, I just had him follow along with me.”
Sándor said, “It wasn’t until that flight with Bob to Bloomington that he thought to himself, ‘Yeah, I can do this.’
“I always wanted to do it, and this was the time, so I literally filled out the paperwork that night,” Sándor said. “Having the controls, I realized I can actually do this because I was able to keep us on that heading, and he’s saying we need to be at a certain altitude, and then as we got closer to the airport we were going home to, he was telling me to go to a lower altitude, and I was able to do that, and just actually doing it and realizing that this was something I could do, you know, and that it’s not out of reach.”
This past Saturday, Bob received another text from Sándor: “Bob — It’s Sándor. Wanted to reach out and say thanks for everything you’ve done for me and the chapter. I just passed my ppl [private pilot certificate] checkride this morning! If you look closely at the picture, you will see it’s an EAA shirt I bought at the leadership conference. I chose it because if it weren’t for you (and Rachel) I would never have got this done. We never officially had the Eagle flight but, on our flight back from the Bloomington YE event you let me have the controls and it clicked, ‘I could actually do this.’ I filed the paperwork in that weekend, though TSA didn’t clear me to start until Nov.”
Bob said he couldn’t be more proud of Sándor’s perseverance and determination.
“I was just tickled pink that he actually got started and that he just kept hammering through,” Bob said.
Sándor writes software and teaches computer programming at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Terre Haute, Indiana. Coming from a teaching background, Sándor said he would love to one day become a certified flight instructor and try a new style of teaching, from the air!
“One thing that I discovered in doing this, there seems to be two different groups of CFIs out there,” Sándor said. “There’s a large group of them that are trying to build hours and go to the airlines, and then there’s another group of CFIs that do it because they just love teaching people and getting people into aviation. So I’d like to help out and I’d like to be part of that, to be a CFI for people who really need someone who cares about them.”