On the first Saturday in October, a small municipal airport on Chewonki Neck Road will fill with the particular nervous energy of children about to leave the ground. From 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Oct. 3, volunteer pilots from the Experimental Aircraft Association's Brunswick Chapter 87 will host a Young Eagles Day at the Wiscasset Municipal Airport, offering free airplane rides to anyone between the ages of 8 and 17. There is no ticket to buy and no fee to pay. If the weather turns sour, the rally shifts to Sunday, Oct. 4.
The event is one stop in a much larger effort. The Young Eagles program was launched by the EAA in 1992 with a straightforward mission: give interested young people a chance to fly in a general aviation airplane, at no cost, with a volunteer pilot at the controls. Since then it has become the most successful program of its kind in history, with more than 2.3 million children flown in some 90 countries as of July 2024. The organization now counts more than 50,000 EAA-member pilots who have shared their time, aircraft and knowledge with young passengers.
The idea did not come out of nowhere. Its spiritual predecessor was Project Schoolflight, co-founded in 1955 by EAA founder Paul Poberezny, which put young people to work building airplanes and ended in 1978. Then, in 1991, the EAA surveyed its long-time members to help set the organization's future priorities. Nearly 92 percent said the group's primary objective should be to involve more young people in aviation. The survey also turned up something telling: respondents reported that a flight experience was what had first inspired them toward aviation. On May 13, 1992, after months of coordination by then-EAA president Tom Poberezny and members of the board, management, staff and volunteers, the Young Eagles program was unveiled at a news conference in Washington, D.C. The first Young Eagles flights were made that summer at the EAA fly-in convention in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, with Academy Award-winning actor Cliff Robertson serving as the program's first chairman. Later chairmen would include Harrison Ford and the crew of US Airways Flight 1549, Chesley Sullenberger and Jeff Skiles.
What makes the program unusual is who pays for it. The flights are free to the families, and the costs — time, airplane and fuel — are donated by the volunteer pilots, with a fuel discount typically provided by the host airport. That arrangement is what allows a rally like the one at Wiscasset to be open to anyone who shows up with a child in the right age range, rather than capped by a budget or a ticket allotment. The presenting sponsors of the national program are Phillips 66 and Sporty's Pilot Shop.
Chapter 87 is a modest outfit with an outsized footprint in southern Maine. Its roughly 31 members meet on the second Tuesday of each month at the Brunswick Executive Airport, and they fly Young Eagles out of Lewiston-Auburn, Brunswick and Wiscasset, depending on the event. Their June was busy: on June 13, chapter pilots flew 78 young people at the Auburn-Lewiston Municipal Airport during the Tailwinds and Tailpipes Air/Car Show, timed to the international Young Eagles Day held annually on the second Saturday of June. The chapter's own meeting minutes from May show the organizers thinking hard about logistics — calling for additional pilots with EAA background checks, planning ground crew to stay ahead of paperwork and traffic flow, and resolving that no child or parent would be allowed on the flight line without an escort. They also worried, half-jokingly, that promoting the event too effectively might bring in more kids than they could fly.
Maine has seven EAA chapters, based at airports in Pittsfield, Bangor, Belfast, Limington, Biddeford, Brunswick and Rockland. The state's flying culture runs deep enough that the national organization's biggest event, EAA AirVenture in Oshkosh, Wisconsin — the largest air show of its kind in the world, drawing more than 600,000 people — is treated by many pilots as a rite of passage, a trip they make at least once in their flying lives.
Wiscasset Municipal Airport is a fitting setting for a first flight. The town began buying the land in 1957, starting with two parcels totaling 106 acres from J.B. Sutter, and added three more the following year. The airport itself began in earnest in 1958, when the Board of Selectmen, led by First Selectman Harold Campbell, submitted a grant application to the then Civil Aeronautics Authority to create an airport. That early grant paid for the recently acquired land and started the design process that would eventually produce the field's single runway. Wiscasset Municipal opened in 1961 with a 2,600-foot turf strip designated Runway 4-22, and an original hangar went up around the same time. In 1962 the runway was extended and paved to 2,800 feet by 75 feet, edge lights were installed, and an aircraft apron and stub taxiway were built. The property has grown over the decades to roughly 257 acres, and today the airport — known by its international identifier, KIWI — sits about 50 miles east of Portland and 12 miles from Boothbay Harbor, with self-service fuel and an automated weather station.
For the children who climb into the right seat on Oct. 3, none of that institutional history will matter much. What they will remember is the noise, the vibration, the moment the wheels leave the pavement and the town where they live tilts away beneath the wing. The EAA frames the program as more than a joyride — an investment in the future, one that has nudged many former Young Eagles toward careers in the military and commercial aviation. But the pitch to families is simpler than that. Show up at the airport on Chewonki Neck Road between 9 a.m. and 1 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 3, bring a child between 8 and 17, and a volunteer pilot will take them flying for free. If it rains, come Sunday instead.