Giving Kids a Lift : Volunteer Pilots Provide Rides to Children Headed to a Camp for Burn Survivors

Up 5,000 feet in thick cloud, 10-year-old Jared McDonald rethinks his preflight vow to wing walk outside the four-seat Piper Archer airplane. Instead, his thoughts turn to the opium of boys everywhere: speed.

“How fast do you want to go?” asks pilot Geri-Sue Popa.

“Fifty zillion miles per hour!” Jared shouts gleefully from the co-pilot’s seat, on his way to a camp for burn survivors.

Here, far away from the kids in Orange who sometimes tease him, anything seems possible to Jared, who was accidentally burned with hot cooking oil when he was just a baby.

Friday, Jared took his first plane ride, his stomach full of Golden Grahams cereal, his head in the clouds. At the controls were volunteer pilots for a statewide group called Angel Flight--which has 35 Orange County members--who flew 17 children, including Jared, from John Wayne Airport to the weekend camp sponsored by the Orange County Burn Assn.

The camp is located 65 miles away from John Wayne in Ramona, near San Diego, an easy drive by car. But Angel Flight pilots wanted to add to the sense of adventure, said Jim Weaver, the group’s executive director.

The nonprofit group typically provides free flights in private planes for needy California patients with serious illnesses or injuries. In recent years, the group has expanded its mission to include flights for guide dogs that need surgery and to assist oral historians from filmmaker Steven Spielberg’s foundation for Holocaust survivors.

This year, the Santa Monica-based group will change its name to Angel Flight West to reflect its expanded coverage area to states including Washington, Oregon and Idaho, Weaver said.

The demand has been overwhelming.

In 1994, when Angel Flight began, its pilots logged 15 assignments. Last year, the group’s 450 pilots flew 639 missions.

Angel Flight takes only nonemergency cases; it is not an air ambulance service. But pilots do fly patients who are too weak to travel long distance by bus or car.

Angel Flight pilots pay for their own gas and maintenance, and spent $300,000 total on flight expenses in 1996, Weaver said. Flight expenses usually run from $100 to $2,000 per trip.

But that’s nothing, he said, compared to the medical bills of seriously ill patients.

“If we can lift one little part of their burden, that’s what we’re here to do,” Weaver said.

For instance, Angel Flight pilots recently helped the parents of a 2-year-old Aliso Viejo boy, who was born with five organs in a sac outside his body. The baby’s father was driving to and from an Oakland hospital every weekend to see his son.

Angel Flight found out about the family’s situation through a social worker and arranged for its pilots, including Bobby Low, to regularly fly the father to Oakland for a year.

The grateful parents invited Low and other Angel Flight pilots to the baby’s christening and a Christmas celebration. At Christmas, the boy ran all over the house, constrained only by the oxygen tubes in his nose, Low recalled.

“The kid would just zing-zing-zing,” said Low, a charter pilot in Santa Ana. “It was just wonderful.”

Friday, at 7:30 a.m., volunteer pilots met the burn survivors group at Sunrise Jet Center’s airport gate, where the owner had donated space for their eight planes and breakfast for everyone.

There, Aracel Gutierrez of Orange tried to prepare her 6-year-old daughter, Lizette, for her first plane trip. Don’t be scared, she told her. Your stomach might get a little queasy. And don’t forget to buckle up.

But Lizette wasn’t scared.

“She’s been telling everyone, ‘I’m going to fly!’ ” said Gutierrez.

Just before takeoff, Jared waited with his father and another camper, 8-year-old Tyler Mayernick, for Popa to complete a preflight checklist. He leaned against the 32-foot wing on her white Piper plane.

“When we start flying, Dad,” said Jared, who wants to be a comedian when he grows up, “I’m going to hang out here on the wing.”

His father laughed, a little nervously.

In the air, the boys put on headsets to talk to each other and Popa, an Anaheim firefighter.

“Wheeeeeee!” Popa cried as the plane kept climbing. “Whoohooo!”

The 45-minute flight was smooth. Along the way, Popa helped them spot landmarks such as Camp Pendleton.

Afterward, Popa said she had as much fun as the boys did.

“I love taking people up flying who have never flown before,” she said. “It’s like you relive your flying all over again.”

On the ground, Tyler said he thinks he knows what he wants to be when he grows up.

“Probably be a pilot,” he said, “so I could steer every day.”

At the Ramona Airport, camper Lilibeth Aguirre, 9, of Orange arrived on another Angel Flight plane. She had to squeeze her nose during the flight, she said, because her ears kept popping. From the air, she saw billowing blankets of clouds.

“When you go up, it feels like the North Pole because it was so white,” she said. “I was like, ‘I wanna touch the clouds!’ ”

Angel Flight information: (310) 398-6123.