Pilots fly in formation to remember active local advocate for the disabled
Flying low over Burbank Tuesday morning, Craig Schulze was “clipping right along” in formation behind his friend Randy Shatz in the lead plane, which was streaming white smoke, and alongside his wingman Jon Carpenter in a third plane.
Then, as the three aircraft passed over St. Robert Bellarmine Catholic Church going about 200 mph, Schulze pulled the nose of his home-built Lancair 360 heavenward and pitched to the west, toward where the sun sets. His friends continued on a level flight path, leaving his rank in the formation vacant.
It’s a maneuver known to military pilots and veterans as the “missing man” formation, which Schulze said Thursday in an interview is a form of salute to someone who has died, with the departing plane “signifying the loved one’s departure to the heavens.”
Schulze and his friends, who frequently fly together in formation out of Whiteman Airport in Pacoima, have performed the salute for several friends and loved ones. The performance this week was an “honor and tribute” to his good friend Kathy Sanks, a Burbank resident who died at Providence Saint Joseph Medical Center in early December. She was 66.
“We’ll call it the ‘missing woman’ formation,” said Terri Gocsik, Sanks’ sister, who said Schulze approached her about doing the salute prior to the funeral. “It was amazing.”
Gocsik said her sister didn’t have a military background, though she had worked to ensure that the recently completed veterans housing project in Burbank was accessible for people with disabilities.
“I think it was more about what she’s done for veterans,” Gocsik said. “It was more like, ‘she did so much for the community and she will be missed.’”
Sanks, who had lost the ability to walk when a spinal cord tumor caused paralysis in her lower body, was the president of the Burbank Advisory Council on Disabilities and a board member of the Burbank Housing Corp.
Last month, shortly after Sank’s death, Janet Diel, a member of the advisory council, said during a City Council meeting that Sanks’ “heart and soul were dedicated to making Burbank accessible.”
Sanks moved to California in 1976, Gocsik said, seeking a job in the entertainment industry and within six months had landed a gig with Cue Cards Inc., where she held cards for soap operas and variety shows, including “Donny & Marie,” and in 1979 became the first woman to pull cards for the Academy Awards.
“She just always had this drive,” Gocsik said.
After leaving show business, she went to work as a paralegal assistant and then a bookkeeper before the tumor was originally diagnosed. Sanks was given a prognosis that she might have five years to live, Gocsik said, but lived more than another 20 years, though it took some time for her to come to terms with the fact that she would not walk again.
“She always had a can-do spirit,” Gocsik said, despite more than 20 back surgeries and other operations. “She was in pain every day, but you wouldn’t know it.”
Schulze, who met Sanks through St. Robert’s church, said he helped Sanks by creating a special compressor that would rapidly inflate her bed after she deflated it to get in or out. He said he also welded her bed frame for her after it once broke.
She was in that bed, he said, when she saw him and his friends fly over the church one other time to honor a friend who had died and “she was just so thrilled by that.”
Sanks was “one of those people ... in your life that you’re just grateful to know,” he said. “Which is why I wanted to do this for her and her family and loved ones.”
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Chad Garland, chad.garland@latimes.com
Twitter: @chadgarland
