 This is Dennis McMahon and welcome to Positively Vermont. And today we are going to be speaking with Ryan Bliss, the president of the Vermont Aviators Association about a very exciting group involved in some extremely exciting projects in our state. And welcome, Ryan. Thank you for having me, Dennis. Really appreciate it. We'll look forward to speaking with you today. Well, just tell us a little bit about yourself. You know, who you are, where you've lived, and how you became involved in the world of aviation. Sure. So my wife and I are both born and bred in New Englanders. I grew up on Cape Cod. I was born in Patukka, Rhode Island. My wife is from the Foster Gloucester area of Rhode Island in the Northwest corner. And we met in Boston. We've lived in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, South Carolina, and just recently moved to Vermont because we love it here so much. And we've been here for a little over a year and we absolutely love it. The people here are great. The activities are great. The aviation community is amazing. So we've been here a little over a year really loving the state and everything it has to offer. As far as how we got into aviation, I started, I took my first flight lesson in January of 2018 in Nashville, New Hampshire at Nashville Airport. And it was a life-changing event. It was the most fun thing I've ever done. And ever since that's what I wanna do every single day and share it with everybody else. So what we're doing as an organization now is we formed a 501C3 non-profit educational organization called the Vermont Aviators Association. And our goal is to bring aviation, education, community and jobs and careers and everything like that together. And so we wanna basically share aviation with the community. And it's a much bigger picture than that sounds. So we are doing events to invite the community down to the local airports to get some great food at the food trucks, go for helicopter rides, meet flight instructors, sit in planes, all of those kinds of things, which is great. But we're doing even more to promote aviation, education, STEM careers and expansion of the aviation sector to the community so that people can feel comfortable and incoming down to the airports and talking to people and really just hanging out enjoying everything that the airport has to offer. So we're also looking to work with VTrans, Vermont Agency of Transportation to improve the maintenance and care of the airports. We have a number of airports that have really suffered due to lack of maintenance over the years. So we wanna improve that because it really affects the economy in Vermont. For example, if Middlebury Airport and Middlebury, Vermont currently the fuel station is down. So they've had an experience where the fuel farm was not maintained properly. Now there's sediments and other particulates in the fuel which make it unusable. And so nobody's going to that airport to buy fuel anymore. So the state currently hasn't done anything to fix that. We're trying to get them to do that but all that revenue that would go to the state of Vermont now everyone is flying to Ticonderoga in New York to get fuel. So we're losing out as a state on that revenue and tax revenue that people probably don't even know about. So there's a lot of things behind the scenes that are really important to make the Vermont's revenue, economy, jobs, education sector as vibrant and as thriving as it possibly can be. So we're working on all those fronts but what people probably see about us the most is the events that we do where we have the food trucks, the airplanes, the helicopters, just really fun days for the family to take their kids down to the airport for three or four hours and really enjoy the airport. But from a big picture we are looking into and working on a lot of different areas of the Vermont aviation sector. There are a lot of resources that you can tap into we can discuss that later on about the aviation scene but if you could just give our viewers an idea of what the aviation picture is in New York. How many, I mean in Vermont, what kind of airports we have facilities and I know we have Burlington International but just give us an overall view of what kind of resources there are in Vermont. Well, so Vermont is really like an amazing state for aviation. The history of Vermont aviation is really deep. Charles Lindberg has been to the various airports in Vermont, Caledonia has had some amazing milestones in aviation going back 100 years, Caledonia airport. And so the resources here are just unbelievable. The people, the airports, the types of services that a lot of pilots volunteer for that people probably don't even know about. Just as an example, Dennis, there are organizations in the general aviation community where pilots like myself and my friends they actually will volunteer their time in their aircraft and the cost of everything for those flights to fly folks that maybe live in rural areas and can't get to a hospital in a city like say Boston, if they need to go to Dana Farber or down to Yale for some kind of treatment but they can't get there. They don't have the car or the means to get there. There's organizations that will fly up to their little tiny airport in their rural towns, pick them up, fly them to Yale, fly them to Boston so that they can have their medical appointments. And this is all volunteer services. And this happens a lot in the state of Vermont. So these airports are really important. We also have organizations that again are just volunteers where they rescue dogs and cats from different parts of the country where they find homes for these animals but they may be 100, 200, 500 miles from where the animal is located. So there's organizations where pilots will volunteer to fly down to pick up the animals, fly them to their new home owners to their new owners location to drop them off. And so there's a lot of things that people may just not be aware of that happen behind the scenes. And it's all from a volunteer team of aviators that volunteer their time, their aircraft and their money to pay for these things. So it's not something you see in the news but it happens all the time. General aviation is also huge with volunteering to respond to emergencies. So anytime there's a hurricane or tornadoes or any kind of devastating events in the US the general aviation community rallies to get items needed for those areas to recuperate and for the folks that need help. And constantly there's a constant stream of general aviation pilots flying their planes loaded with supplies to all these little tiny airports to help people in those kind of circumstances. So even though folks may not be aware of that it's not in the news, there's a lot of stuff that happens at these little tiny airports in Vermont and everywhere else in the country that is really valuable to the residents and citizens as well as jobs, education and taxable revenue as well. It's amazing. Well, there might be an image that people will have about a private pilot being an incredibly wealthy guy or some important person or someone associated with the military or the government. Tell us if this field is open to more people than those who are professionals and how does one start? Someone's going to be watching this video on television and they're going to be wanting that. That might interest me. Maybe it could take us through some of those aspects of your association. Yeah, you bring up a really great point Dennis. I would say the general community that's not involved in general aviation has a conception that you have to be a billionaire or a millionaire in order to fly airplanes and the reality is that's just not true. You can buy an airplane, a functional safe airplane from anywhere in the range of 10 to $15,000 up to, just imagine a millions of dollars in everything in between. But if you're driving a Toyota Camry, Ford F-150, a mini van that's been built in the last five or 10 years, you can buy an airplane for the same price. We have a number of aircraft at our airport that were purchased for $25 to $35,000. And so that is disposable income, obviously. So you do need to have some disposable income, but you don't have to be a millionaire or a billionaire. Another affordable way to learn how to fly is by joining a flying club. People probably aren't aware of this, but if you join a flying club, the beautiful thing about that from a financial perspective is you spread the operating costs in insurance and everything, all of those costs for the aircraft amongst 15 people. So it's a very affordable way to fly. The most expensive part of flying is buying and maintaining an aircraft. So if you're part of a club and you can spread that amongst 15 different people, you've reduced your costs significantly. And generally for a non-profit flying club, most of what you're paying for is fuel. So you have to pay for the fuel that you use in the aircraft, and then you generally will pay up a monthly due. That covers the operations and maintenance for the aircraft, but it's very affordable. You do have to share the plane with 14 other people. So you have to schedule it efficiently, but it's a way to fly in an affordable fashion. And so that's something that I think is maybe not put out to the public enough, but my goal and our goal as an organization, and I'll look with a lot of the pilots across the state is to start even more flying clubs. We do have a number of flying clubs in Vermont. They'll be posted on our website once we launch that later in July. But so anybody can find that information if they visit from aviators.org once we launch the website in two or three more weeks. But just realize that's available. So if you could answer your local airport, you can ask people, hey, is there a flying club? Do you have a flight school? Are there flight instructors here? What's a cheap way to fly or an affordable way to fly? And just get in that conversation or contact us. We're happy to walk people through it as well. And to answer your second question, how do people get into aviation to become private pilots or commercial pilots? It's pretty simple, but again, it's not one of those things that is really, I can tell you when I first started flying, I had no clue how to schedule a lesson. I really had no idea. So if it's something you wanna do, you just, again, once our website is published in the next two or three weeks, all of the details of every flight school in Vermont will be on our website. But essentially what you wanna do is just do a Google search. Flight schools, flight training in Vermont or in Burlington or in Rutland or Swanton, Vermont, any of those types of Google searches will pop up the available flight schools. And all you have to do is just give them a call and they'll be happy to schedule an introductory flight lesson with the person. And that basically is sort of an orientation lesson where the individual will come down to the airport, meet the flight instructor. The flight instructor will walk them through the procedure to become a private pilot, all the steps involved. And then they'll take them up for usually a 30 to 60 minute flight with the new student just to show them what it's like to fly the plane. They'll take them up, let them do some maneuvers, probably do an approach to land, but not quite land. That takes a little more practice. But that's generally how you wanted to do it. And now the other thing too that's really important is there are lots of scholarships available to become private pilots, commercial pilots to add ratings. We're gonna have a scholarship section on our website that people will be able to go to and they can see all the available scholarships. The scholarships are not generally utilized as much as they should be. So it's something that we would encourage everybody to look into if you need some assistance with flight training, if that's something you wanna do. Another thing too is that folks are thinking about becoming professional pilots, commercial pilots. There's such a massive shortage right now for commercial pilots in mechanics and controllers in the US that a lot of the airline companies will take people in right off the street to a certain degree and they will actually put them through all the training that they need to become a career professional pilot. And then at the end of that they'll have a job. So it's one of those careers that is very lucrative and the demand is massive right now and anybody can do this job. I mean, the training is amazing to become a pilot, the training by the airlines. So if it's something you're interested in, you should either contact us, we can help you find the appropriate people to get that conversation started or just search on your own for the airline companies that have training programs for new pilots. I'll give you an example. When I was doing my private pilot training with my flight instructor, he had a student who young student, you think he was about 23 or 24 and he was about 10 hours into his private pilot flight training. So only 10 hours into it. And he applied for a job at JetBlue. They interviewed him, they loved his interview skills and his intelligence and everything. They hired him to come on, not to start flying for JetBlue granted right away but to come on and go through their, basically their college like program to become trained as a professional pilot. So that is something that people can do if they're interested in that. And again, we're happy to help point people in the right direction for those kinds of contacts and connections. That's great because I was gonna ask a lot of things you've already covered, which is fantastic. You know, about the opportunities, about the state of the industry, the benefits of the state. And we have a great deal of public officials who watch the show and participate with town meeting TV. And that's good for them to know as well as for the public to know. And what I'd like maybe if you could just describe your plane and your experience with it and some of the things you have done in your flying career, that might keep some more interest in getting involved. Sure. So great questions. So as far as my experience, like I said, I took my first flight lesson in January of 2018 and I have type on diabetes. I've had that since I was nine years old. My little brother has it as well. So getting a first class medical was not really an option for me to become a commercial pilot. And now it's possible, but it's extraordinarily expensive and difficult to achieve. But so I got my private pilot certificate, but I fell in love with aviation so much that I wanted to change careers. I was in the medical industry for 20 years and I wanted to get into aviation because I just loved it. And so in July of 2019, I got my remote pilot certificate. And that's basically a, it's called a part 107 certificate. And that's a commercial drone operator certificate. And so I started a drone inspection company called Infrared Aerial. And I specialized, my company specialized in doing utility scale solar plant inspections, renewable energy inspections. So I purchased the drones and infrared cameras necessary to do that. And I started flying large solar plant inspections. And that was my job. I did that all year long, made a decent living at it, enough to be comfortable and happy. And I got to work outdoors every day and not in an office. And it was just a great job. I loved it. And so over the last year, I've added an instrument rating to my private pilot certificate so that I can fly in the clouds or fly just according to the flight instruments and not being able to see outside. So that was a big accomplishment that I did in, accomplished in January. And as far as my plane, my wife and I had been renting planes and we also joined a flying club when we were living in South Carolina. But we purchased a plane about a year ago, a little over a year ago and it's a Vans aircraft which is an experimental amateur built aircraft. It's called the RV10, so Romeo Victor 1-0. And we've been loving that plane. It's a four seat plane. It has pretty good fuel efficiency. It's a fairly fast plane and it can carry a thousand and five pounds of people, baggage and fuel. So we have a decent load that we can carry with the plane to get places. We've flown it a lot around New England. So we love taking it for day trips to anywhere in New England, Maine, the Southern coast, Lake Ithaca, different places. We have two bicycles that we throw in the back of the plane. And whenever we get somewhere, we don't need to rent a car or anything. So we just take the bicycles out and ride around the area, which is really fun. We've flown it to Florida. We're planning to take it out to the West Coast later this year. And so I had mentioned too that our aircraft is an experimental amateur built. So there's two types. There's lots of different types of planes, but there's two main categories of planes. It's certified. And certified just means that the FAA has, the company manufacturing the plane has put it through all of the FAA requirements to prove that it's safe and for people to fly. And then they start manufacturing it. Think of it like Ford or Chevy, they get all the certifications done and then there's a production line that pumps out the planes and sells them. Experimental amateur built planes are a different category of plane where an individual who might be inclined to building cars or anything really, a lot of aerospace engineers get into this where you can buy a kit plane and build it yourself. So it's not as intimidating. It is a big job, but it's not as intimidating as it sounds. So most of the modern kits today are more assembly projects than actually creating your own scrap, your own parts out of scrap metal and building them and all of that. So the new kit planes typically will have pre-punched holes and a lot of the work's been done and it's more of an assembly project. So our aircraft is an experimental amateur built and the benefit of an experimental amateur built is that they are a fraction of the cost of a certified plane and you can use a lot more equipment, avionics and different materials for the plane based on what you wanna use. And typically the cost for all of the avionics and equipment that you put into an experimental amateur built plane are a fraction of the cost of the certified equipment even though they're made by the same manufacturer and they're more or less the same exact product because it's EAB experimental amateur built the cost is significantly lower. So for anybody that likes to build and has a garage and would be interested in putting a couple of years into it it's probably the most rewarding project you'll ever have in the communities, the builder communities in aviation are massive. So you have these massive networks of other folks that have either already built planes or are currently building planes that will act as mentors and coaches for the people doing it for the first time. There's also a number of organizations like AOPA, EAA and others that will actually they conduct courses all the time throughout the year where you can actually go to the course and learn how to build your own plane from experts. So there's a lot of resources out there to kind of go on either path that you decide is best for you. That's great. Why don't you tell us about we're recording this on June 23rd but you've had some events in the last month or so why don't you tell us give us a picture of how those events what they were and what took place there? Sure. So part of our statement bringing together aviation, education and community is the community end. So our events are more about bringing the local community into the airport and to experience all the amazing fun and what is often perceived and correctly so off limits to the general public. You can't really drive down to your local airport and just go on to the other side of the fence. So we want everybody to come down to the airport come on to the other side of the fence. Let's look at all the planes, go sit in some planes take a helicopter ride, eat some good food play some games and activities that we have out for the kids. So really it's there's no real specific purpose what we just want to do is share this with everybody. We want everyone to come down and just enjoy the airport. And one of the really nice side effects of this has been generating a lot of interest by kids and adults to become pilots. So we've partnered with some of the major flight schools like Vermont Flight Academy. And for example, at our last event in Rutland Vermont Flight Academy came to the events they had a table set up to speak to anybody interested in taking lessons. They also brought their Satabria which is an aerobatic plane, tail wheel plane. It's a beautiful plane. And one of their flight instructors, Owen White who was actually my instrument flight instructor great guy, super smart, very patient great instructor and pilot. And they were at the event and letting kids sit in the Satabria and talking to anybody interested in taking flying lessons. So it was just a really nice resource for people to have at the airport during our events where if they came down and they just, you know maybe they're just curious like how do I become a pilot? Owen could tell them every detail about that as well as, you know if they wanted to schedule a lesson they could talk to Owen right there and schedule a lesson at Vermont Flight Academy in Burlington, as well as letting their kids sit in a really cool Satabria aircraft. So, you know, that's kind of our goal is we want to get people down there and to be perfectly honest, you know my personal goal is I want to be able for our organizations to be able to contribute to STEM aviation education in Vermont and career growth in Vermont. And so this, the aviation sector is going to be flush with jobs that are well-paying and we want to give the folks, the kids really that are interested in that the opportunity to have a pathway to those careers and we want to contribute to that to help them. So that's really what our goals are for these events and how we've been conducting them. And we hope to grow these events, you know to a larger scale than we've already done. You know, we estimate we had about 1,000 to 1,200 people in Rutland for our events on June 12th in and Franklin County the week before I think we had about 700 or 800. So there's clearly an appetite for this. And, you know, we want to give the local Vermont residents everything that they need to satisfy that appetite. Those are very good numbers. And about the Franklin County airport event didn't you have an exhibition about the history of aviation in Vermont or working on something about that? So we didn't necessarily have an exhibit but we did bring some antique aircraft and we had those on static displays. So everybody could go up and, you know sit in the plane and, you know play around with the flight controls, take some pictures and everybody was allowed to do that and welcome didn't encourage to do that. So there were folks, you know the event was four hours and there were folks getting in and out of those planes with their kids all day long. So it really paid off. We had an old Antonov from beta that they sponsored the event and let us bring that aircraft up from the mid 1940s. And so that's, you know, considered an antique and it's a really amazing airplane. It's just such a cool aircraft. You won't see those almost anywhere in the US and beta is just such a huge aviation supporter and advocate that they brought it up. And so that was wonderful. But we do plan on having more aircraft on display for every event for people to see. That's great. I remember as a child going to Floyd Bennett Field and seeing the planes there and going actually in the cockpit. But that was ancient history. That was way ancient. But you still remember it. I do, absolutely. One thing I just want to ask you about I know there's some geography here North, South, East, West and some parts of the state are accessible or not accessible or more scenic than others. Just tell us about how that plays into flying. Yeah, so, you know that. So Vermont has a very interesting and unique topography as everyone knows, we've got a ton of great mountains for skiing and hiking and lakes and rivers and everything. So that's one of the huge attractions of Vermont. That's part of the reason why I moved and why everyone that is lucky enough to grow up here loves Vermont and wants to stay here. As far as how that affects flying, it's interesting. So Burlington International Airport is, I would say one of the easier airports to fly into because there are some mountains on the approach end for one of the runways. But for the most part, it's a flat entry to the runway. So it's fairly easy to approach. But then you have airports like Middlebury Airport where it's very close to some mountains. And so you have to stay on one side, the western side of the airport to land. And they currently don't have any instrument approaches, although we'd like to change that, with our organization would like to get that change. But in Rutland's another example, we're very close to the mountains. So you have to be comfortable with flying fairly close to the mountains and being aware of how the wind travels over the mountains and how that could affect your aircraft during flight. So it is something where if you're gonna fly in Vermont, you need, it's nothing overly to be overly concerned about. You just have to be aware of your surroundings as you are anytime you're flying an aircraft and just understand how the mountains will affect your flight and how to best approach that. So that's kind of the major considerations when flying in a mountainous state. I know you mentioned one or two businesses, but you have received some corporate or business support from various sectors of the state. Did you like to mention some of those people? Yeah, no, thank you for bringing that up Dennis. So at the moment, we haven't proactively seek to any sponsors yet that will change once our website is up. But we have a lot of companies that just wanna help out and support because they see the value of the aviation sector to not only their businesses, but to the communities. So we have a number of sponsors already and these are all sponsors that we didn't really go out looking for, but we've partnered with. So one is Cape Air. So Cape Air flies from Rutland to Boston and back three times a day. So if anybody didn't know that, you now know that you can get to Boston from Rutland three times a day, which is really nice because there's no charge for parking at Rutland Airport and anybody that's ever driven to Boston knows that it's a different story in Boston. Parking can be anywhere from 30 to $50 a day depending on where you park. So that's really nice. So they're sponsoring all six of our events at Rutlands, which is really great. We also have another local company in the Rutland area called Browns Auto Salvage. And they're a financial sponsor for the season for our events in Rutland. So they're a great organization that wants to support the aviation sector. And then we have a number of local, or well, not just local, but local and regional aviation companies who are supporting us by donating products. So for example, wheel and aerospace technologies is based in Connecticut and they've been donating LED landing lights for aircraft that we can use for raffles. So we've been raffling off one of their LED landing lights at every event. And those landing lights are worth $300. So it's a pretty substantial donation they've given us. Green Mountain Avionics is one of the leading avionics service companies and equipment companies in the United States. They're based at Middlebury Airport and they've donated avionics services packages for us to raffle at our events for pilots. And that's a huge value. And then our local maintenance shop at Rutland Airport, SDR service, which is run by Scott Draper. They've donated aircraft oil changes for us to raffle off at events. So we've gotten a ton of support from local and regional businesses in the aviation sector and outside the aviation sector because they realized the value of having a strong and thriving aviation sector in the state of Vermont. That's great. Well, thank you very much, Ryan. My guests, and certainly we're gonna have you back in the near future when things occur and you're looking for a more public interest and support. And this has been a very excellent interview. Thank you. My guest today has been Ryan Bliss, the president of the Vermont Aviators Association here on Positively Vermont. This is Dennis McMahon. Thank you for watching. Thank you.