Van Nuys : Pilot Lets Disabled Fly in Face of Limitations

There was a time, Rick Amber admits, when he thought he’d never fly again.

Returning from a combat mission over Vietnam in 1971, he crashed onto the deck of an aircraft carrier and lost the use of his legs.

“I was lucky to get out alive,” he said this week. “I should have been killed.”

Today, he has a different mission--demonstrating to people like himself that the skies are open to everyone.

This week, the 51-year-old Dallas resident brought his unique form of recreational therapy to Van Nuys Airport, taking members of a social group for disabled adults on aerial tours of the Los Angeles basin for more than four hours.

“We just had a ball,” Amber said of the 30-minute evening flights, which included San Fernando Valley and Downtown tours and a Malibu sunset.

For the members of Out and About, it was a brief bit of freedom from the laws of gravity and the occasional awkwardness of navigating a wheelchair.

“It’s like you’re set free,” said 27-year-old Jennifer Cabernoch, who plans monthly outings for the group. “There’s an ease and fluidity that you don’t have down here on the ground. You’re soaring.”

For Amber, who travels around the country in a four-seat Cessna he operates with hand controls, escaping physical limitations is a powerful feeling.

“Mostly it’s the impact of leaving your wheelchair on the ground,” he said.

Although he charges a fee for his plane rides, Amber said the knowledge that he’s opening the horizons of many disabled adults and children is the more rewarding payment.

“The smiles and the grins--that’s my payoff,” he said.