Wheelchairs Don’t Keep Pilots Down

When Mike Smith taxis his Piper Arrow at Van Nuys Airport, he is just like any other professional pilot. But when he gets out of the plane and slides across the wing into a wheelchair, it becomes apparent that he is different.

Smith has climbed into cockpits since he was 18. He got his pilot’s license just after he graduated from high school and later flew helicopters in Vietnam.

When he crashed a crop-dusting helicopter 12 years ago, an accident that broke his back and paralyzed his legs, his flying days seemed numbered.

But within two years, he had his wings back. Smith, now 49, was running a construction company but kept thinking about flying. He missed aviation.

“I thought that if I had to do other things, I was going to die,” he said.

Like hundreds of other people in wheelchairs worldwide, Smith turned to the International Wheelchair Aviators for help. Based in Escondido, the IWA was founded by Bill Blackwood, who himself is wheelchair-bound and who in 1968 developed hand controls for many types of aircraft.

Smith mastered the hand controls and started renting airplanes from Aero Haven, a small company in his Big Bear home.

When Aero Haven came up for sale in 1990, Smith bought it and began to offer flying lessons and charter work.

“You can really do anything you want to if you want to put your mind to it,” Smith says of his return to flying.

In 1993, Smith began a courier service for First Mountain Bank of Big Bear and now flies to several L.A. area airports, including Van Nuys every weekday. He also outbid 14 other aircraft operators, including former employers, for a contract with the state of California to fly officials looking for pollution sources along the Santa Ana River.

No customer has ever refused to fly with Smith because he is in a wheelchair, but he notes society’s views of the disabled.

“It is always an uphill battle for us. Everybody looks at us like, ‘There’s another person on welfare, they can’t do anything, they’re helpless.’ They find out that I’m doing all this stuff,” he said. “That is what I like to emphasize--yeah, check it out. I throw it back in their face.”

On the east side of Van Nuys Airport, another IWA member, Thad Taft, keeps a Piper Cherokee, which he flies for pleasure on weekends.

Taft became interested in aviation in the mid-1940s, when he flew model airplanes during junior high school. After high school, Taft joined the Air Force as a crew member on a B-26. A crash during the Korean War put him in a wheelchair.

Taft, 64, describes his life as a series of unplanned events. After the war, Taft entered a program to train aircraft workers, but his skills in designing wheelchair accommodations for his Compton home led him to 10 years of working in architecture.

In 1967, Taft began to work at Lockheed as the result of a chance encounter at a party. At Lockheed he met a wheelchair aviator who introduced him to the Blackwood hand controls. In 1971, Taft learned to fly.