Orange County Flight Schools Hit Turbulence : Aviation: Recession takes a toll at John Wayne Airport, but love of the wild blue yonder keeps aerobatics fans airborne.

RANCHO SANTA MARGARITA —  Michael Church is about a mile or so over this south Orange County town, so high that entire subdivisions look about the size of dinner plates.

“This is a ‘knife edge,’ ” he tells a white-knuckled passenger before turning the single-engine Decathlon plane on its side, so that the wings point vertically, straight up and down.

On the right side of the plane--where a few seconds ago Santa Catalina Island was basking like a big whale on the horizon--there are suddenly rooftops and roads and trees and freeways.

Church holds the plane on its side for a moment as the ground whizzes by at 120 m.p.h., then gently brings the plane upright again.

Church is a brisk, businesslike man of 48 who runs the largest aerobatics school on the West Coast. In fact, Lenair Aerobatics at John Wayne Airport may be the largest such school in the nation.

But these are tough times for flight schools: Changes in federal tax laws in the mid-1980s made it harder for schools to get their hands on planes.

And the recession, of course, means that fewer people can afford the expense of flying lessons. It can easily cost $4,000 and take six months, for instance, for even the brightest student to acquire a private pilot’s license, and that’s without extra lessons for aerobatics. Aerobatics training could run you up to $1,200 more.

Like other small businesses, many flight schools often lack a formal business plan and enough money to get the business through rough times. They tend to go out of business with alarming frequency.

For example: Ten years ago up to 10 flight schools were at John Wayne Airport; now there are five.

“People don’t come into this business to make a lot of bucks,” Church says. “They tend to operate on very slim margins. They come in because they love to fly.”

Take young flight instructor Josef Bostik, for instance, who has to love flying because the pay for teaching is not the best. Most instructors get $18 an hour or so from the $27 the school usually charges students. But, like Bostik and the other 14 full-time flight instructors here, an instructor often gives just five hourlong lessons a day, then spends another five or six hours hustling new students and checking the airplanes for problems. That can mean less than $500 for a 55-hour week.

The pay and lousy hours are the major reason almost every flight instructor wants to become a commercial airline pilot. In the meantime, teaching people to fly private planes is the easiest, cheapest way for a civilian to rack up flying experience that the airlines demand.

But the airline industry is feeling under the weather these days too, and there’s little demand for new pilots. So people such as Bostik have to be even more determined.

And Bostik is; he wouldn’t be in this country at all if he weren’t. He started out, after all, hang-gliding in his native Czechoslovakia and once considered escaping its Communist government aboard a glider. Eventually he got out by hitchhiking to Germany, where he got permission to come to the United States.

Even this guy over here, the flight student in the tank top and cutoffs who is scrubbing the windows on a small plane parked on the Tarmac, already has that gung-ho pilot’s attitude. A passenger, shrugging himself into a parachute for the first time, looks at the sky and asks nervously: “Good day for flying?”

A big, white Alaska Airlines jet is whining and screaming a few hundred yards away, gathering itself at the end of the runway for a leap into the air. The student ignores the racket, looks up and says: “It’s an awesome day for flying.”

You might think that aerobatic flying would be a daredevil sort of thing, but it’s not always: One in four people who sign up for aerobatics at Lenair are the same students who were most nervous during basic flight training and who look at aerobatics mainly as safety training.

“Modern flight training is not very good at dealing with anxiety,” Church says, “and some people never get over their anxieties about flying.

“But with aerobatics we can at least show them more about the things that can scare them, like going into a spin. And then we can help them realize they can stay in control of the plane.”

The sport of aerobatics began almost as soon as pilots began to fly planes, but formal international competition started only in the early 1960s. Americans used to dominate the sport, but in the mid-1980s Soviet pilots came up with a fabulous $100,000 airplane that has helped them master the skies.

A mere handful of American pilots--just 600--compete in U.S. aerobatic competitions. Unlike air shows, aerobatic competitions are not staged for the benefit of people on the ground. Nope, this is far more serious stuff, and you generally will not see much unless you are in another airplane.

Of the 600 U.S. pilots, just 50 are considered world-class competitors. Surprisingly, few of them are full-time pilots. But they are affluent; this is one of the most expensive sports in the world.

“It’s not a sport for the young,” says Michael R. Heuer, an airline pilot and president of the International Aerobatics Commission. “In fact, most of the competitors are in their 40s and 50s.

“It doesn’t require a great deal of physical strength and stamina,” he says, “but it does require a great deal of money.”

Of the men who are members of the U.S. aerobatics team that will compete this summer for the international championship in France, Heuer says, one inherited his money, one is an aerobatics instructor, one is an aerospace engineer and another is an electrical contractor.

There used to be more airline pilots, he says, but many of them these days are having a tough time financially too.

Church himself competes a couple of times a year in California aerobatic contests; any more, he says, would be much too expensive.

There are fewer than 30 aerobatics schools in the country, and almost all of them are in Southern California, Texas or Florida. The reason: You need consistently good weather for aerobatics because you must be able to see the horizon at all times. No school has more than Lenair’s eight aerobatic planes, which suggests that Lenair is probably the largest aerobatics school in the nation.

Church runs Lenair Aerobatics and Sunrise Aviation--the regular flight school--from a cramped suite of rooms in a two-story, stucco office building crouched on the southeast edge of John Wayne Airport. Church was a flight instructor when he bought Lenair Aerobatics from another flight school in 1985, starting with one plane. Now he has 27 airplanes available for aerobatic and regular flying instruction.

Church’s small, windowless office is extremely Spartan for a guy who says he runs a $2-million business: There’s a scuffed carpet, a couple of battered plastic chairs, a picture of a sailboat on the wall and a computer terminal.

John Wayne Airport is usually one of the five busiest airports in the nation, although--unlike the other four--most of the flights here are small planes, not commercial airliners. That makes it a very unusual airport, where the general-aviation businesses--everybody but airlines--constitute a political and economic power to be reckoned with.

Sometimes the flight schools and the aircraft repair businesses and the others squabble with the airlines and the airport over allocation of space or some other problem, and sometimes they coexist. Because neither general aviation nor the commercial airlines are particularly healthy now or in much of a hurry to expand, there is peace.

Still, because of all the activity, it is a lot more complicated flying in and out of John Wayne than it used to be. As Church flies down to Rancho Santa Margarita for a little aerobatics one recent weekday afternoon, in quick succession he finds himself talking to the tower at John Wayne, a controller at El Toro Marine Corps Air Station and to a third, regional air traffic control system.

The stubby orange-and-white Decathlon, with the student’s seat in front of the instructor’s, pushes along about 90 m.p.h.; the brown, serrated edges of the mountains are down and to the left, the ocean glitters to the right, an occasional cloud is off in the distance like a sail run up a mast.

Now it’s time for some aerobatics. Such maneuvers are forbidden around the airport and the Marine base, so Rancho Santa Margarita--far south of the airport, a 10-minute flight--is the closest place to practice.

In a plane this small you feel the same as if you were in a canoe nearly half a mile in the air, that the slightest motion could set the plane tipping precariously. This illusion gets only stronger as Church banks the Decathlon to one side, then another.

Next there’s a loop: The horizon starts to tilt at a crazy angle, then reappears straight ahead--except it’s upside down. The plane completes the loop and is suddenly right side up again.

It seems unlikely that a lot more people such as Church will open flight schools. It’s a much more complicated business than it used to be, and people who have survived have had to be extremely competitive.

And it has been a lot harder to get airplanes since Congress in 1986 did away with most of the tax advantages of leasing your airplane to a flight school. Because it is harder to make the airplane pay for itself in tax write-offs, fewer people are buying them.

Then there is liability insurance, which can add tens of thousands of dollars to the cost of a plane. It’s so high these days that “lots of companies don’t even make trainers anymore,” says Bruce Goodman of the National Assn. of Flight Instructors. “Cessna hasn’t made one in 10 years.”

Still, there’s something about flying that will probably continue to attract people such as Church, who once studied English at Yale. Every now and then, a literary allusion still finds its way into his speech. Especially when he talks about flying.

“Lindbergh said flying is just the right blend of science, romance and adventure,” he says.

“At heart, you know, it’s not a business at all; it’s really a sport.”

Airspace for Aerobatics

To ensure that pilots are away from high-population centers and areas of dense air traffic, the Federal Aviation Administration has placed special restrictions on the type of airspace aerobatic flyers can use. In Orange County, one of the more popular sites is the airspace just south of Coto De Caza and north of the Ortega Highway.