E-Mail This Article to a Friend TRAINING DAZE Flight club BY CHRIS WRIGHT

Drew Steketee wants you to be a pilot. In fact, Steketee wants you to be a pilot so much that he runs a program called, appropriately, Be a Pilot. For the somewhat disturbingly low price of $49, you can log onto Be a Pilot’s Web site (Beapilot.com), sign up for a certificate, and, within a few days, be taxiing down the runway at the helm of a light aircraft. "It’s easy," Steketee says. "Anyone can fly."

Q: Are there any restrictions for the service you offer, any age requirements?

A: You have to be 14 years or older.

Q: So I could come to you as a 99-year-old?

A: Absolutely. We get a lot of grandmas, retirees, people looking for something new in life. They stop and say, "Is this all there is?" Then they go out and learn how to fly.

Q: What if I were blind?

A: You could. The flight instructor is what’s known legally as "pilot in command," so the student doesn’t have to meet FAA requirements. Hopefully the student will enter the flying community in the future, but if they’re blind, that would not be such a great thing.

Q: What kinds of planes can people expect to fly with you?

A: Generally, it’ll be a four-seat, single-engine plane that flies at about 130 miles an hour.

Q: How high up are they?

A: Several thousand feet. There’s no reason to go to higher altitude. Plus, one of the fun things is to see what things look like from the air. You see the lay of the land. It’s a fascinating revelation for people. You see the world as it is.

Q: Are there parachutes?

A: No, parachutes are not used in civil aviation. Jet fighters are the ones with ejector seats.

Q: Isn’t this kind of dangerous?

A: No. The public’s perception of flying is formed from misimpressions, watching World War II bomber programs on television, where the plane’s going whum-whum-whum. Flying is like sitting in a very comfortable chair in your living room most of the time. On long trips, one of the challenges is staying alert, because it’s so doggone relaxing.

Q: I’m afraid of heights. Should I not do this?

A: I’m afraid of heights. If I get above 10 or 15 feet I get squeamish, but that doesn’t apply to flying a plane — you don’t get the sensation of height.

Q: Have things changed for you since September 11?

A: The whole nation cocooned after 9/11, and that was noticeable in our program. The real proof of the pudding came in 2002. People came back to flight training in droves, and the reason for that was people wanted to go out and live their lives and regain the freedom that someone tried to take away from us.

Q: Have you heard from the FBI?

A: They came to see us.

Q: What did they want?

A: There were some issues that I’m not going to discuss with you. They wanted to understand what this program is about. We are, by the way, not a method to infiltrate people into the US. Learning how to fly a light aircraft was not the enabling technique for the 9/11 attacks. Learning how to fly a Cessna is not going to equip you even to find some of the switches in a big airliner.

Q: Still, you wouldn’t want me to say, "I’d like to fly over the nearest nuclear power station."

A: Let me cover that by saying that federal regulations now say no aircraft may loiter in the vicinity of any key piece of infrastructure, specifically a power plant but also dams and other key infrastructure. You may fly over them, but you cannot loiter.

Q: How do you loiter in a plane?

A: Well, you can’t sit and circle a nuclear plant for five minutes.

Q: Do you have to keep an eye out for suspicious types?

A: The flight schools and people at the airport have programs to educate them on what to look for. There’s a special number to call to report suspicious activity. You see something funny, you call that number.