The Light Stuff : Aviation: Jack Brian built a remote landing strip in the Mojave that has become a haven for the growing sport of ultra-light flying.

Picture a man who almost single-handedly built an airport in a remote part of the Mojave Desert.

He carved a landing strip into the brush- and rock-covered land, erected a couple of hangars and lives out there alone--at the end of a dirt road not found in the Thomas Guide--in a trailer with his dog, Shadow.

The man you’ve pictured probably does not resemble Jack Brian, the founder and proprietor of Brian Ranch Airport, a haven in the Antelope Valley for the growing sport of ultra-light airplane flying.

Brian, 67, is soft-spoken and gentle in manner. And he is a man who always, when working around the airport, wears a necktie. Always.

Even when he is alone except for Shadow (whom he dresses in a sweater when the weather turns cold). Even when he is standing out in the hot desert sun, using a welding torch.

“I feel naked without a tie,” he said almost apologetically, putting down the torch to take a break. Brian was welding together metal parts for a cart to be used to move ultra-lights in and out of the hangars. His tie, somewhat faded from years of wear, featured red and blue diagonal stripes.

“Old habits die hard,” he said.

Brian is not eccentric; he’s British.

He got in the habit of wearing a tie as a young man while working for the famed Royal Aircraft Establishment, the major research and development center for the Royal Air Force.

“They would send you home if you didn’t dress properly,” he said with a lilting accent.

Brian’s gentility and friendliness sets the tone at the airport, even though ultra-light pilots--who do not need a license to fly these lightweight vehicles that started out as motorized hang gliders--have long had a reputation as the rough-and-ready daredevils of contemporary aviation.

“He is very different from what people might expect out here,” said pilot Bob Comperini, who lives in Palmdale, standing out on the airfield just before starting the engine of his airplane.

He does this by pulling on a handle, just like any suburbanite starting the lawn mower.

“The accent, the tie,” Comperini continues over the roar of the 76-horsepower motor. “But look what he has done. He has made a great place for us.”

The remoteness of the site that Brian chose is perfect for ultra-light flying.

“In these airplanes, you should never fly over anything you are not willing to land on,” said Mark Sult, a pilot certified to teach ultra-light flying. Standing on the edge of one of the airstrips, Sult pointed in several directions.

Except for the house of a neighbor about a mile away, the nearest buildings were far in the distance.

“That is not much of a problem out here,” Sult said.

Under Federal Aviation Administration regulations, ultra-lights are to be flown strictly for recreation. With an imposed gas tank limit of five gallons, a cruising speed of about 40 m.p.h. and a prohibition against their use at night or over populated areas, the aircraft are hardly utilitarian, anyway.

“It is strictly for fun,” said Larry Harvey, 49, who works as an air traffic controller at Palmdale Airport and is learning to fly ultra-lights. He had just come down from a training flight in a two-seater that Sult uses for instruction.

“You really get the experience of flying,” Harvey said, “like back in the old stick-and-rudder days.”

Because of the bad reputation ultra-lights have, the pilots at the airport bring up safety about as often as they talk about their resentment of government regulations on aviation. But that doesn’t keep them from having some old-fashioned, barnstorming-type fun.

On a slow Sunday recently, when a spate of especially cold weather kept away all but the most die-hard pilots, Sult and Comperini played a game in which one of them tossed out a roll of toilet paper while in flight.

Then they alternately swooped down, trying to catch some of the paper as it unfurled downward.

Brian watched the two pilots at play. “Where there are other airplanes around, you can’t do something like this,” he said, smiling. “This is a nice place for people who want to experience aviation.”

The sport has attracted people who are uncomfortable in modern jets.

“I was afraid of even being a passenger,” said Sue Jordan, 34, also an air traffic controller at Palmdale Airport.

“My vacations were all planned around a cruise ship or someplace I would drive.”

Jordan came to the Brian airport with her friend, Harvey, to watch him take a lesson. She was fascinated by the ultra-lights, which resemble go-carts with wings, but still wary.

Sult told her that the aircraft had come a long way since the experimental early years of the sport in the 1970s and 1980s.

Eventually, Jordan agreed to a short trial flight in the two-seater. “Mark said we would go for 15 minutes, and if at any time I didn’t like it,” she said, “I could get right back on the ground.”

The flight lasted 45 minutes and she was hooked.

“When I try and explain the feeling to people,” said Jordan, “I tell them if they’ve ever stood on the ground and watched the birds, wondering what it would be like to be up in the sky, that’s what it feels like.”

Ultra-lights, however, were not what Brian had in mind when he first planned his airport in the 1970s. At the time, he was a senior scientist with Hughes Aircraft.

“I had always wanted to have a small airport for a group of people I like,” said Brian, settling into his easy chair in the sparsely furnished trailer. “I wanted a flying club, a nice place for general aviation.”

General aviation pilots are licensed to fly small, private planes. Brian had been flying these kinds of planes since 1958. He had previously been a pilot of larger, military planes during a stint with the Royal Air Force.

Brian came to the United States to pursue a career as an engineer. At Hughes he oversaw the team that developed components for space shuttle communications.

While working at Hughes, he and his wife, Beryl, often took weekend car trips to look for their dream airport site. In 1978, they bought 36 acres near Llano, about 20 miles east of Palmdale.

“I liked this spot because it was flat and at 3,000 feet elevation, the temperatures were just about right,” Brian said.

“We decided that this was where we wanted to go after I retired.”

In the early 1980s the Los Angeles County Regional Planning Commission granted him permission to build a public airport on the land.

But his dream changed as the years went on. In the fall of 1987, Beryl died of cancer. He hired an airplane to skywrite “Goodby Beryl” over the Rose Parade on the New Year’s Day that followed.

And general aviation had changed. It had always been a costly hobby, but because of soaring aircraft and insurance prices, general aviation was too expensive for all but a few people who dreamed of becoming pilots.

Pilots also complained about the ever-increasing commercial air traffic in urban areas and FAA regulations that they considered stifling.

Ultra-light aircraft was, for those who wanted to avoid the big-ticket items and regulations, a way to fulfill their desire to fly.

But first the sport had to go through some rocky years. “The equipment was not so sophisticated in the early days,” said Peter Klein, a Palmdale automobile mechanic who started flying ultra-lights in the early 1980s. “There were no gauges, there was a lot of experimentation.”

The sport also attracted a thrill-seeking crowd, Klein said. “It was new and there were a lot of hot-doggers who were crazy,” he said. “They did not know how to take care of the aircraft. They thought they could just do anything.”

As the aircraft became sturdier and more airworthy, a national association of ultra-light pilots that had formed set the standard for training.

There are still fatal accidents. This year in Sonoma County, two men died when their newly purchased ultra-light crashed into a hillside. Last year a Camarillo man died when his aircraft went down in a strawberry field while he was practicing forced stalls.

Earlier this month, a Kern County man was killed when his ultra-light struck the guy wire of a radio tower.

“You can never forget that these are actual airplanes,” said Comperini. “If you don’t pay attention or know what you are doing, you can get into trouble.”

Two years ago Brian took early retirement from Hughes and moved up to the airport to work on it full time. By then, he saw that his business would center almost entirely on ultra-lights.

“This kind of flying is great fun and people seem to love it,” said Brian. “We always stress safety.” There have been no injury-causing accidents at his airport.

Partly because of the safety record, he got permission last year from the Planning Commission to house up to 30 ultra-lights on the property. He charges ultra-light owners $60 a month for hangar space. At the moment, he has about a dozen signed up.

“It doesn’t make money yet, but if we hit 30, we will break even,” he said.

Brian has started renovating one of the hangars to make it into a pilot’s lounge. “It will be a nice place for pilots to fly in from all around here, have a cup of coffee, sit and talk,” he said. “And we very badly need bathrooms out here.”

Brian’s companion, Felice Apodaca, comes up on weekends from her job in Los Angeles to help at the airport. She looks forward to the day that the operation becomes self-sufficient and she can move up there permanently.

Sitting in the trailer, she points out an old radio transmitter from an airplane that they hope to use to communicate with ultra-lights.

“I plan to be queen of the radio,” she said with a laugh.

But while trying to make Brian Ranch Airport viable, Brian does not cast off the importance of good manners.

“We get a nice crowd here,” he said. “We don’t vote on who we include here, but just about.

“A guy once came here who just wasn’t a nice fellow. We didn’t tell him he couldn’t stay, but we did tell him how wonderful some other airports were.”

Brian laughed and got ready to get back to his welding.

“He got the message and moved on.”