Scattering Folks’ Final Wishes to the Winds

When it’s all over for Glenn True, he knows with more precision than most of us just what should occur.

A Dixieland band beside the airport runway will play “Sweet Georgia Brown.”

A Beech 18 will be warming up, with True’s son Brian, a commercial pilot, manning the controls. Just one of the plane’s two engines will be kicking over, but as the canister containing True’s ashes is eased into the aircraft, the second will roar into action.

Then Brian will head for the lovely blue-green gap between Anacapa and Santa Cruz islands. With the pelicans and sea lions and steep island cliffs as witnesses, the winds a thousand feet above the waves will take what’s left of True, whose powdery ashes will vanish in an instant.

“The gap is my favorite spot. It feels good to me. The water is always clear and pretty,” said True, although the 54-year-old Ventura firefighter is not expecting to depart any time soon.

It’s not surprising that True should have such an explicit vision of what the lawyers and funeral directors might call his final disposition.

Years ago, he released his grandmother’s ashes over the same spot.

Then, a good friend asked him to do the same for a deceased parent. Soon another friend asked the same.

In the past year and a half, he and Maggie Bird, his partner in a part-time venture called Phoenix Flight, have similarly accommodated perhaps 100 local families. The two, both pilots, are state-certified disposers of cremated remains. They operate Phoenix Flight from the Santa Paula Airport and they give no frequent-flier miles; this is a journey made but once.

Business is taking off. Until this year, California was the only state in which it was a criminal act to spread the ashes of a loved one on private property. Now it’s legal, but only with written permission from the property owner. This allows grieving families a broader range of choices, and gives Phoenix Flight more room to roam.

With a permit from state parks officials, True and Bird on Thursday swooped down over Sycamore Canyon in the Santa Monica Mountains. Hundreds of rose petals, red and yellow, drifted over a family waiting below. Then the plane looped over a ridge. True unlatched the bottom of his side window, undid a canister and let loose the ashes of a man who not so long ago possessed a certain passion for hiking the Santa Monicas.

“It only takes 15 or 20 seconds,” he said with a touch of awe.

Minutes later, they made their second and final drop of the day, at their much-frequented gap between Anacapa and Santa Cruz. The woman had lived to an old age, and had been ill for some time. Her husband thought she’d appreciate the simplicity and mystery of a scattering at sea. Most of Phoenix Flight’s clients make the same choice.

Sometimes people are so emotionally overwhelmed, they can’t scatter the ashes themselves. When they do manage it, to their distress breezes blow ash back at them. True heard of one incident in which a family on a magnificent hilltop couldn’t open the sealed urn, which got away from one of them and rolled down the slope, with huffing uncles in pursuit.

A Phoenix Flight over the ocean costs $100, but more complex affairs run to more than $350. That comes on top of the cremation fees charged by funeral directors. Even so, with conventional burials easily ranging into the thousands, the scatterings are sweet, good buys, in True’s estimation.

The business was not at first greeted warmly by local funeral directors. A similar operation in Northern California collapsed in scandal after more than 5,000 ash-filled urns were found abandoned in a warehouse.

But word of mouth has helped, along with schmoozing the local funeral directors. When True retires from the Ventura Fire Department in a few years, he hopes to make Phoenix Flight a full-time job.

Even so, some requests have to be rejected. True couldn’t drop ashes over a cemetery in Fillmore because he couldn’t guarantee the ashes wouldn’t drift over the surrounding property. And he’s not hopeful about helping out a woman who wants her ashes divided in thirds.

One-third would be scattered over a pod of dolphins in the Santa Barbara Channel.

“No problem,” True said.

The second portion would be dropped over Lake Tahoe--an easy task, True said, because there are no cumbersome anti-ash laws on the lake’s Nevada side.

But the final third would be bound for the skies over Disneyland. True doesn’t think the proprietors of the Happiest Place on Earth will go for it.

Steve Chawkins can be reached at 653-7561 or by e-mail at steve.chawkins@latimes.com.