Aviators’ Oasis : A Desert Airport--the Realization of a Man’s Dream--Caters to Ultra-Light Craft

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--at the end of a dirt road not even in the Thomas Guide--in a trailer with his dog, Shadow.

The man you have pictured probably does not resemble Jack Brian, the founder and proprietor of Brian Ranch Airport in Llano, 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, 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 in 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 the lightweight vehicles that started out as motorized hang gliders--have a reputation as the rough-and-ready daredevils of contemporary aviation.

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

Comperini does this by pulling on a handle, like a suburbanite starting his 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 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.

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 over populated areas or at night, the aircraft are hardly utilitarian.

“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.”

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

Ultra-lights were not what Brian had in mind when he 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 an 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 previously was a pilot of larger, military planes during his Royal Air Force stint.

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

While 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.

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

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. Because of increasing aircraft and insurance prices, it was too expensive for all but a handful of people who dreamed of becoming pilots. Pilots also complained about the growing commercial air traffic in urban areas.

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.”

“It was new and there were a lot of hot-doggers who were crazy,” Klein 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 set the standard for training.

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There are still fatal accidents. Last year in Sonoma County, two men died when their newly purchased ultra-light crashed into a hillside. In 1992, a Camarillo man died when his aircraft went down in a strawberry field while he was practicing forced stalls.

In December, 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,” Comperini said. “If you don’t pay attention or know what you are doing, you can get into trouble.”

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

“We always stress safety,” he said, and there have been no injury-causing accidents at his airport. Partly because of the safety record, he got permission in 1992 from the planning commission to house up to 30 ultra-lights on the property. He charges 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.

Brain has started renovating one of the hangars to make it a pilots 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.”