Stories That Fly

About

Grass roots, blue sky. The best digital stories in general aviation.

Stories That Fly is an innovative online community news venture that features the very best narratives, photography and video from general aviation.

Our effort will improve the public understanding and awareness of general aviation through the creation of digital narratives and stories designed to appeal to all.

We will feature the work of our students, citizen journalists, aviation enthusiasts, professional writers, reporters, videographers and photographers.

People are inspired by flight and the capacity to move through the world in three dimensions. In Ohio, flying attracts – but it also employs and services a significant piece of the economy.

There are 166 public airports and 772 private fields serving general aviation with the system’s total impact in 2006 estimated at $10.5 billion.

“A mile of road will take you one mile. A mile of runway will take you anywhere.” No one is quite sure who said this first—but I am guessing when they did—they were looking through the propeller arc of a J3 Cub, and the airplane’s wheels were just rising above the dew on a narrow green patch of grass somewhere in Ohio.

General aviation in Ohio is anything but the airlines—and includes everything from family-run flight schools to the farmer’s grass airstrip and aerospace entrepreneurs dreaming of “roadless trucks” for third-world countries.

The light of the mainstream media often shines brightly on the jet drivers, millionaires and astronauts. But what most people don’t know is that you are as likely to find them here, at the local airfield with the other legends and leagues of hard-working folks whose lives are deeply rooted in the nation’s birthplace of aviation.

Among them are the freight dogs, restorers, crop dusters, mechanics, parachute packers, blimp and balloon drivers, flight instructors, students, sport pilots, and airfield operators. They all feed their families and love of aviation by living and working around the flying machines that most of us see only as specks in the early morning’s blue sky.

First kachingled on:
Nov 02, 2011

Photo Credit:
Description from site and Twitter.
http://www.storiesthatfly.com/main/about-stories-that-fly
http://twitter.com/#!/storiesthatfly

Photo courtesy (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en) of Flickr user Horia Varlan
http://www.flickr.com/photos/horiavarlan/5019447085

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