ISU students are taking to the skies between classes at the Ames Airport. Employees at Hap’s Air Service, located at the airport, said students discover newfound freedom when they taxi off the runway, across the horizon and out of sight.

Turning ambition into air time

Adam Crane loves airplanes — enough to get down on his hands and knees to wash them, enough to fill them up with gas and do other maintenance and enough to take to the driver’s seat whenever he gets a spare minute.

Crane, junior in industrial technology, works for Hap’s Air Service at the Ames Airport while taking classes at Iowa State. He’s also one of multiple ISU students who have taken flying lessons from Hap’s.

Twenty of the 35 people actively enrolled at the flight school are ISU students, said Christa Holden, office manager.

But Crane hopes his dream will take him farther than Kansas City, Omaha, Minneapolis or Cedar Rapids, locations most often traveled to by pilots leaving the local airport.

“I’m in the Air Force ROTC and I want to be a pilot someday,” he said. “I did this to get a jump start.”

Crane put in 15 hours of air time with an instructor before taking his first solo flight in February of 2002.

“Flying is the ultimate sense of freedom,” he said. “You’re not bound by any dimension at all.”

Crane has also had his share of challenges.

“I’ve had to land in strong crosswinds and the plane goes up and down,” he said. “It’s unnerving.”

His longest journey took him to Chicago, a two-and-a-half-hour flight from Ames, in a tiny plane that traveled 120 miles per hour. Most of the nine planes Hap’s owns can fly for about six hours before having to refuel.

During the school year Crane spends most of his time on the ground, working 10 to 15 hours a week for Hap’s. He said working on the ground crew provides its share of lessons, too.

“I get interested in how things work and pester the mechanics,” he said.

A thriving local business

In the “glory days” of aviation, some 400 airplanes would land and take off from the Ames Airport a day, said Robert Holden, shop foreman for Hap’s Air Service. That was back in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Today, the airport sees anywhere from 50 to 100 takeoffs and landings a day, and Hap’s Air Service is thriving with about as much work as it can handle.

“When Iowa State has something going on, we get eight to 10 business jets coming in,” Holden said.

A surge in “precise farming” is bringing in more business as farmers increasingly rely on aerial pictures taken from 8,000 feet to monitor their crops. Infrared and regular aerial shots show areas that receive too much or too little nitrogen or fertilizer, Holden said.

The cameras used can achieve one meter of resolution and improving technology will make the new wave of cameras even better.

Hap’s, which leases the city-owned land, also offers flight instruction for anyone over 16 years old. Five flight instructors juggle lessons with 35 active students, each of whom is required by the Federal Aviation Administration to complete 30 hours of instruction and 10 hours of solo flight to get their private pilot’s license.

“Most people can’t do it in 40 hours,” Holden said. “Our average is 45 to 50 hours, which is quite good. If people can make time to come and take lessons two or three times each week they’ll stay on track.”

Holden said ISU students are some of the best flight school students.

“They treat it as a class and they’re serious about it. They go home and study,” he said. “It also looks good on a r‚sum‚ if a potential employer can see that you’ve stuck with something over a long period of time.”

The airport crew does routine maintenance for the nine planes in Hap’s fleet and any other customer planes that need work. Holden calls it “preventive maintenance.”

“If you don’t repair these things, the law of gravity will get it eventually,” he said.

Holden said an airplane needs similar maintenance to a car, including replaced spark plugs, fuel systems and tires.

“An airplane has an internal combustion engine just like a car,” he said. “The only difference is that it is air cooled rather than water cooled and uses a propeller instead of wheels.”

Politics and inflation have also forced airplane prices up from $35,000 per plane in the 1980s to more than $200,000 now.

Product liability and inflation is mostly responsible, Holden said. Improved technology in the cockpit may also play a role. For instance, one plane at the airport houses a $5,000 global positioning system and a $3,000 radio.

“These planes are very labor-intensive to build,” Holden said.

Students enrolled in the flight school pay $100 an hour to rent the plane. Hap’s provides the fuel, which the plane burns at a rate of around nine gallons an hour.

Crane said the time, money and effort has already started paying off for him.

“Taking lessons here is something not everybody else gets to do,” he said.