VAN NUYS : Kids Receive a Flight Lesson--on the Ground

Ericka Licea had never gone anywhere in an airplane before stepping into the 80-passenger jet. An hour later, she still had not left the ground, but her goals for the future had soared.

“I want to fly,” the sixth-grader said.

Ericka and 60 schoolmates from Kester Avenue Elementary School in Van Nuys were the first students to visit the new Caravelle Aviation Classroom, a restored French-built plane at the Van Nuys Airport that is being used to teach children about flying.

Airport personnel conduct tours and mini-classes in the plane, which opened last week. Offered only to schools, each tour includes a 13-minute video and a trip to the cockpit.

“I thought it would be boring,” said Ericka, a tall, shy 12-year-old with long dark hair. “I want to be a pilot.”

In the 1960s, the red, white and blue Caravelle jet was a busy United Airlines passenger plane. But for the past eight years it lay abandoned, its tires flat, on the east ramp of Van Nuys Airport, accumulating a whopping $22,000 in parking tickets.

Then, Ed and Barbara Cesar came along and saw a future for it.

“I used to teach kids how to fly airplanes,” said Ed Cesar, whose company, Syncro Aircraft Interiors, remodels the insides of airplanes. “What I wanted to do is have some classroom associated with flying and show them how a cockpit works.”

The Cesars spent three weeks and $20,000 restoring the craft, which had last been used as a corporate jet in the 1980s.

The engines were removed, comfortable cotton/polyester seats two to an aisle were refurbished and television monitors were installed. Airport tower chatter could once again be heard on the cockpit radio.

To the children, it would not have been more real if they were served peanuts.

Ericka and her classmates scrambled for seats and buckled their safety belts. “Captain” Robert Jackson, a flight instructor and part-time guide at the airport, took hold of their imaginations with his microphone.

“Welcome aboard. This is your captain speaking,” Jackson told his hushed passengers. “We are passing over Geneva, Switzerland, inbound for Paris.”

But it was cockpit that gave the students the closest feeling to actual flight. Jackson crammed several eager children at a time into the two-person cockpit, fielding questions that came quicker than flak from an antiaircraft gun.

“How does a pilot learn what to push at what time?” asked 10-year-old Liliana Limon, her eyes staring at the dozens of gauges, dials, buttons and other instruments. At the end of the 30-minute presentation, the children checked out other aircraft, including a World War II-era B-25 bomber.

“It’s better than school,” Ericka said. “There’s more learning.”

The Cesars hope that Ericka and her classmates’ experience was the first in a regular series of flights of fancy.

“It’s something magical to give to a child,” Barbara Cesar said. “The dream of flight.”