Flying high, close to home

By Ben Olson
Reader Staff

Ten years ago, Ken Larson had a discussion with a female student at Forrest M. Bird Charter Schools about the possibility of creating an aviation class for students. From those humble beginnings, Larson created what is now known as the North Idaho High School Aerospace Program, a nonprofit organization tasked with teaching students everything they want to know about aviation, including learning to fly, building and maintaining airplanes.

“That first year, we did a class at the charter school and had 12 students,” Larson told the Reader. “Six of them are now professional pilots.”

NIHSAP will host “10 Years of Success” Saturday, June 3, an event open to interested students and the public, who are invited to see the airplanes up close, speak with experts in the aviation field and network with companies interested in hiring bright young workers into one of the fastest growing industries in the world.

Students from North Idaho High School Aerospace Program explore a helicopter. Courtesy photo.

The event will take place at the high school student hangars at the Sandpoint Airport, 1100 Airport Way, with the morning hours of 8:30-10 a.m. dedicated to a “coffee hour meet-and-greet” for students interested in meeting local pilots and representatives from local aviation companies. This will take place at Granite Aviation. Then, from 10 a.m.-1:30 p.m. members of the community are invited to check out what Larson’s gifted students have been up to, with ramp and hangar tours. Daher will also have their famed Kodiak aircraft on display.

Larson said he got hooked on aviation after taking some flying lessons as a senior in college.

“After I graduated, I was getting drafted, so I joined the Air Force because they were desperate for pilots,” Larson said.

Larson served as a flight instructor in the U.S. Air Force before briefly enrolling in law school — which he described a “ridiculous idea” — and finally returned to aviation to fly business jets. He later retired and began teaching the next generation of pilots in North Idaho.

“Aviation has been fantastic for me,” Larson said. “It’s the old cliché; I felt like I should share that with other people. For me it was never fun if it was all about money. It’s about the students I meet and the other pilots involved. We’re giving back to the community by getting some new aviators out there.”

When Larson launched NIHSAP, he was only teaching classes at the charter school, but soon a generous donation would bring the program in a new direction.

“The end of that first year, we were donated a kit plane by a guy in Sun Valley,” Larson said. “There was no place to work on it, so we took over the woodshop at Sandpoint High School and because we were then moving up there, we moved our class to SHS that year, too.”

And so Larson and his band of about a dozen aviation students began building an airplane at SHS, also providing flight training to students as part of the class. They later rebuilt and installed an engine in a converted World War II glider trainer called “Patches,” because it has been patched up so much.

“Today, we have almost 40 former students who have gone into aviation careers, or are in aviation college programs,” Larson said with pride. “They all attributed our high-school program to getting them started.”

For Larson, you can’t beat the aviation industry for its potential for growth and opportunity.

“It’s a growing industry and there’s an incredibly huge demand for engineers, pilots and mechanics,” he said. “The students are seeing opportunities open to them. Every aviation company emphasizes that they need people at every level. They need people doing everything from assembly line to engineers to bookkeepers and receptionists.”

Looking back, Larson said he has former students who have gone into airport management, aviation or aircraft engineering or maintenance and mechanics. Many are professional pilots now and four have joined the military in fields somehow related to aviation.

With an average of 15-20 students every year, Larson’s class is split into three components: the class taught at SHS called “Career Pathways,” flight training that gives students a leg up to obtain their private licenses and the ACES Workshop, dedicated to airplane building with expert mentors passing on their knowledge.

“We have one student who started with us in ninth grade and is now an engineer at Tamarack Aerospace,” Larson said. “We’ve had a couple of students go directly from high school to building a Daher Kodiak. We’re actually working on an internship to guarantee our students an interview for jobs at Daher.”

For Daher (pronounced “dye-AIR”), high school aviation programs like Larson’s are essential not only for exposing students to a love of aviation, but they’re also beneficial to help tap into a potential workforce eager to jumpstart their careers.

In 2015, a Japanese company called Setouchi bought Quest Aircraft in Sandpoint. Quest had established itself with its versatile Kodiak aircraft, renowned as a rugged airframe utilized for humanitarian missions requiring pilots to fly low and slow without fear of stalling, and able to land just about anywhere.

When French aviation company Daher purchased the company in 2019, they saw it as a great fit for their family-owned aircraft company, which has been in aerospace since World War I.

“Quest came up with an amazing design,” said Daher Human Resources Manager Jeffrey Perkins. “We’ve been very fortunate with this acquisition. … Daher is a great partner for North Idaho.”

Perkins said aviation programs like NIHSAP are one of many ways Daher reaches out to the next generation of aviators and aircraft mechanics and builders. 

“In Sandpoint … maybe 40% of students go onto college while the other 60% stay here, live with their parents, maybe flip burgers and find some kind of minimum-wage entry level job,” Perkins told the Reader. “They may not have a great future unless they do something unique.”

Perkins said Daher benefits greatly by hiring students from high-school aviation programs for a number of reasons, but mainly because of the head start aviation students obtain from those classes, as well as difficulties obtaining workers requiring a move to the area.

“If I want to hire an assembler to work on our planes and he has to move here from somewhere else, how easy is that going to be in Sandpoint, Idaho?” Perkins asked. “That’s going to be a tough sell with how the economy is and with what the median real estate prices are like now.”

With local students, however, Perkins acknowledges it can be a win-win situation right out of the gate.

“If I can somehow help the North Idaho community have a pathway for someone to stay here and work and live here, I think that’s a win for both the community and Daher,” Perkins said.

Because of the meticulous nature of building airplanes and the endless safety precautions, Perkins said training a new employee who has never worked in aviation before usually takes six months, which means productivity slows.

On the flipside, if Perkins can hire a former aviation student who knows a bit more about what to do before they even start work, “I can shrink that six months of training down to six weeks. Then we’re an even better employer and company for it. To me, that’s a win-win. That’s why Nicolas [Chabbert], our CEO, is convinced we need to invest in these programs.”

Perkins confirmed that Daher would have representatives on hand June 3 at the Sandpoint Airport to answer questions and potentially plant the seeds of future careers in prospective young employees.

With an ambitious goal to build 30 planes a year, Perkins said Daher’s desire for talented workers won’t go away any time soon. Perks that Daher offers its employees are attractive, such as teaching skills that can easily be transferred into other industries, and also offering not just Sandpoint as a location to work and live, but any of their plants scattered across the U.S., Mexico and Canada. Even with 262 employees in Sandpoint and another 35 contractors, Perkins said he still “can’t find enough people, because, in truth, Daher has plans to grow manufacturing until we’re at full capacity. We’d love to bring on a second shift, so we’re trying to find people.”

With such promising careers in aviation right here in our backyard, Larson looks with fondness over the past 10 as a time when he and fellow aviation mentors have instilled their love of flying to the next generation.

“The mentors we work with are all amazing people with so much experience in airplane building,” Larson said. “Ted Farmin is kind of a legend around here. Ed Meyer has built an airplane and is on our board of directors. Tom Dean was an engineer at Boeing and he volunteers here on Saturdays. They’re all locals and they all love to devote unbelievable amounts of hours to those students.”

Larson also acknowledged that Sandpoint has for years been known as an aviation-friendly town.

“Not only is it aviation-friendly, but several people who have come through here for conferences and such have remarked on how many women pilots we have here,” Larson said. “Over half of our students are female, both in flight training and aviation and airplane building. We have girls as young as 12 years old. There was one group of three or four girls who rebuilt an engine with a cutaway, so when you move the propeller you can see the internal parks working. They did that when they were 12 years old and it took them two years to complete. That’s impressive to me. Those are our students.”

For students interested in learning more about a potential career in aviation, attend the “Ten Years of Success” open house Saturday, June 3 at the Sandpoint Airport. To learn more about the North Idaho High School Aerospace Program, visit highshoolaerospace.org.