September 2015
Every day, most of us in aviation spend at least some time thinking about the future of General Aviation. To reverse a declining pilot population and replace senior aviators who lose their medical cards or go west to fly with Lindbergh, we must be constantly recruiting the best and brightest students right now.
The need to develop a steady stream of fresh young minds to join the aviation family is not just about issuing pilot certificates. In the decades to come, the aviation industry will need engineers, technicians, executives, designers… the list is long and the need is great.
And if you want to see where many of these NextGen aviators and aviation/aerospace industry workers will come from, a visit to Raisbeck Aviation High School in Seattle (RAHS) would be a great place to start.
One of RAHS’s mathematics teachers, Richard T. “Edge” Edgerton, has a devotion to preparing each class for success that goes far beyond the classroom. That’s because Edgerton is as dedicated to giving back to GA as he is to his students. And if his sense of community service and advocating for GA rubs off on his students, that’s just fine with him.
Edgerton is a 2,000- hour instrument rated CFI with commercial ratings in single- and multi-engine land airplanes, and also holds a single engine seaplane rating. He bases his flying at Boeing Field (KBFI) in Seattle and flies a Piper Twin Comanche, among others.
Edge knew he wanted to fly from a very early age. “I dreamt about flying very early in life. Initially, I would just leap off the ground and slowly rise, passing trees, housetops, power lines, etc., and would imagine the view below and feel both exhilaration and calmness as I slowly moved along.
“I was in high school when I took my first airplane flight—a seaplane—after which my dreams focused on the logistics of airplane flight, traveling to new places and the panoramic view from aloft.
“As I grew older, I began daydreaming about flying so much I soon realized I was obsessed. That’s when I surrendered myself to flight training and learned the greatest lessons of my life, two of which are: flying is much more difficult than I had imagined, and the experience of flying was greater than I had dreamed!”
Along with donating his time to provide free flight training to RAHS students in aircraft from a local flying club (the student must rent the airplane, pay examiner’s fees, etc.), he also uses his personal airplane for other purposes, particularly Angel Flight nonemergency medical transports, and in support of Paine Field Aviation Days.
At Alaska Airlines Aviation Days events, he makes his airplane available to Boy Scouts who need to perform ground tasks needed to complete their aviation merit badges.
If that isn’t enough giving back, Edge is also an officer in the Civil Air Patrol (CAP) and flies orientation flights for CAP cadets and teacher members. In addition, he provides emergency services such as disaster relief, search and rescue, photo recon, border patrol and counter-drug missions.
Edgerton is part of a staff that does extraordinary things at RAHS, a very special educational environment that’s not in the business of cranking out pilots or specifically preparing students for aviation careers. Instead, Edgerton explains, RAHS uses aviation as the context for instruction to prepare kids for college.
“As a theme-based school,” Edgerton said, “we understand that all careers are represented within aviation, so using principles, problems and situations from the world of aviation provide the context around which instruction is delivered.
“Say I am teaching a unit on trigonometry. After building the underlying concepts much in the same way the ancients must have constructed the system, students solve problems related to cross-country flight planning (e.g., heading and ground speed).”
While RAHS is not a flight school in the same way Embry-Riddle is an aeronautical university, the students are immersed in aviation in a big, big way. That’s because of a very cool mentor program that matches nearly all of RAHS sophomores with a mentor in an aviation- or aerospace-related field.
Last summer, 160 students interned at organizations including Boeing, Blue Origin, Planetary Resources, the FAA, Galvin Flying Service, Clay Lacy and various engineering firms.
Edgerton says the service these mentors provide to the students is truly overwhelming. “Whether the student is interested in business, medicine, FBO operations, law, space, or something else, local companies are amazingly eager to help.
“Every internship experience is truly empowering for the students, helping them learn the relationship between school and work along with discovering whether a career they may favor would be as engaging as they imagine,” he said.
Due in part to this mentoring program—along with keeping the students engaged through the use of aviation as the conduit for teaching—RAHS’s adjusted four-year graduation rate for the class of 2013 was 94.7 percent, according to data from the local school district, Highline Public Schools.
“We have an unusually high graduation rate,” Edgerton said, “and I believe it is due to the expectations of students and their parents to succeed and persist through college, the fact that students must apply to the school and promise to go to college, and the relevance of the aviation-centric tasks we teachers give the students.
“We have a few very talented people at RAHS who oversee both scholarships and internship opportunities for students,” Edgerton said. Some RAHS graduating classes have received over $1 million in scholarship awards.
“This part of our school is probably what most sets us apart from others because of its depth and commitment to student service. We show students in their advisory class how to sift through the enormity of information on the internet to find funding for college, then support them further by writing letters of recommendation.”
RAHS teachers like Edgerton are dedicated to seeing their students succeed in whatever field they may choose, and those students who will go on to become active pilots are introduced to the social aspect of being in the aviation family while they are still in high school. Perhaps nothing can prepare a student for the camaraderie that exists in our small but loyal community more than pancakes.
In the RAHS weekly newsletter—aptly called “The Notam”—near the end of the 2014-2015 school year was this nugget: “We will start with a Pancake Breakfast in the commons at 8:30 a.m. The staff will have stations set up to prepare pancakes galore—almost every imaginable type of pancake is offered.
“We at RAHS strongly consider the notion of family as it is extended throughout the school setting, and nothing says ‘family’ more than sharing food and conversation. Kids watch out for each other and we treat our students as if they were our own children. We love and respect our students, which is why we drive them hard—–and then feed them pancakes.”
Dan Pimentel has worked in journalism and graphic design since 1979, and is the president and creative director of Celeste/Daniels Advertising and Design (celestedaniels.com). He’s an instrument-rated private pilot and has been writing the Airplanista Aviation Blog (airplanista.com) since 2005. You can find him on Twitter as @Av8rdan. Send questions or comments to editor@cessnaflyer.org.
