Pilot Program

At age 74, retired schoolteacher Ralph Truglio should be relaxing instead of sitting in the right-hand seat of an aging airplane as a nervous teenager guides the craft to a landing at toward Van Nuys Airport. But Truglio says he loves every minute of it, even the bumpy landings.

Truglio, who grew up in the Silver Lake area, began his love affair with aviation in 1927, when he heard about Charles Lindbergh’s epic flight cross the Atlantic. Two years later, his grandfather surprised him with a $7 ticket for a sightseeing ride out of the old Grand Central Air Terminal in nearby Glendale.

That first flight, in a Ford tri-motor plane that took him over Santa Monica Bay, hardened his resolve to become a pilot. “I knew then that I wanted to fly,” he said.

In 1941 he joined a civilian pilot training program while a student at what was then Santa Barbara State College. The next year he enlisted in the Army Air Corps.

After the war, Truglio quit flying at the request of his wife, who believed a schoolroom teaching post was safer.

But by 1960, he was also teaching flying. Boy Scouts of America offers ground school, and the Optimist Club of North Hollywood provides airplanes and the actual flight training taken by the kids in Truglio’s classes.

Graduates of his program have gone on to fly for United and American airlines and Federal Express. Others are now flying corporate jets for Disney, Peterson Publishing and other large companies.

He is anything but a pushover as a flight instructor. Truglio tells about a 16-year-old-girl taking his lessons who became frightened whenever the time came to practice landings. She would always turn to him and say, “You land it.”

Truglio tried to help her overcome her fears, but finally one day he said to her: “It’s time to quit this business.”

The student was his stepdaughter.