Future aviators attend summer camp
There are a whole lot of summer camps going on out there, but today News Five’s Kendra Griffith visited one in Ladyville that has really taken off.
Kendra Griffith, Reporting
These teenagers are different ages, come from diverse backgrounds, and hail from across the country, but they were all drawn to the Tubal Training Institute in Ladyville for one reason: a love of aviation.
Nazhib Gibson, Aviation Enthusiast
“When I was small they took me to the airport and took me to see helicopters and I just fell in love with helicopters and aviation.”
Leo Matura, Aviation Enthusiast
“We can’t fly without wings so I wanna fly in a plane at least.”
Melvin Diego, Aviation Enthusiast
“I am interested in aircraft maintenance.”
Connie Luo, Aviation Enthusiast
“I always wanted to be a pilot, I was always interested in this kind of thing, flying. I just love going into planes.”
The teens are participants in an Aviation Summer Training Class and for the next four weeks, they will be learning skills that can help to turn their dreams into reality.
The camp is the brainchild of Belizeans Rudy Serrano and Larry Pratt. Both men returned home a couple years ago after living and working in the United States: Serrano as a base maintenance manager for U.S. Airways and Pratt as a pilot in the U.S. military.
Rudy Serrano, Aviation Camp Organiser
“Having to have been blessed overseas with a good career, I saw the opportunity for Belizeans to also be able to capitalise on aviation.”
Larry Pratt, Aviation Camp Organiser
“We’re trying to expose them to aviation itself, not only the operations, but also the maintenance portion, navigation, and just give them a general idea of what aviation is all about.”
To fulfil that objective the men have called upon a number of military and civilian engineers, pilots, and technicians to facilitate the programme.
Francis Lizama, Flight Operations Inspector
“We have a lot of enthusiasts out there who are young, who are vibrant, people with energy and who are quite interested in the aviation field.”
Francis Lizama, who works as a Flight Operations Inspector with the Department of Civil Aviation is one of the lecturers.
Francis Lizama
“We just spoke about basic principles of safety and trying to get the concept of perceiving the information to process and perform the information and to evaluate the information in flying, which is very, very important for them in the flying field.”
Rudy Serrano
“The programme is really split in two parts we have some students who will be doing flight training, piloting, learning about aircraft piloting. By the end of this session they would have experienced some aircraft control and actually flying on live aircraft. For the children who will be doing aircraft maintenance, which will be about fifty percent, they will be actually maintaining some aircrafts. They will be lectured on various subject matters from hydraulics, structures, sheet metal, electrical.”
Leo Matura
“The training, it’s a lot of information that you’ve got to jot down but it’s enjoying, not boring. I like it.”
Connie Luo
“People might say it’s boring, blah, blah, rules, rules and you have to do that, you have to be careful of that, but I think it’s really interesting. To me it’s a wonderful experience to be here and learning all these things.”
Kendra Griffith
“What are you looking forward to most in the next couple of weeks?”
Nazhib Gibson
“Learning how to fly.”
And while the course ends on August sixteenth, Serrano and Pratt say they plan to continue to stoke the interest of Belizeans in the field of aviation by opening a school.
Rudy Serrano
“We plan to meet with the Civil Aviation Department, work with them and see what it will take to get a certificated programme in place. The hours that the kids had in this programme they will be credited toward that certificate when we have the programme in place.”
“Especially with the expansion of the airport we expect more aircraft coming to Belize, so what we need to do is make the pre-emptive strike and get our people trained so that when this influx of aircraft come in here we have people trained that can maintain them, we don’t have to go and import this labour.”
Larry Pratt
“We are lacking a lot of things in aviation, but I think that we have the resources, the individuals and when we put all these things together we can be just as competitive and just as heading in the same direction as other countries or neighbouring countries.”
The men hope to have things in place to start classes by September. Kendra Griffith reporting for News Five.
While the students pay fifty dollars a week to be enrolled in the programme, that does not fully cover the expenses of the course, which are underwritten by Pratt and Serrano.
