On the fly

Paul Salmon first started learning to fly when he was 14 years old.

As a kid in the Cairo, Illinois, area, he would ride over to the local airport on his motorcycle -- a machine he'd owned since age 10 -- and pretty much pester the folks there in an attempt to ingratiate himself. He was, for all intents and purposes, a kind of mascot to the regulars.

"I hung around long enough until they gave me a job pumping gas," recalled the co-owner of Cape Copters at the Cape Girardeau Regional Airport.

That odd gig soon led to taking flights "with some of the guys" on weekends, which eventually turned into Salmon receiving formal lessons from his first real flight instructor, a man named Melvin Thurston. Thurston was one of those larger-than-life characters whose day job was working for the state police as a sort of flying traffic cop.

"Melvin is now deceased, but at one time he had more than 30,000 hours of flight time," Salmon said.

A sign hangs on the fence at Cape Copters Thursday, in Cape Girardeau.Glenn Landberg

It wasn't difficult to accumulate those hours, since Thurston jetted around the friendly skies all day every day as part of the local traffic patrol. But logging that much flight time still registered as a big accomplishment, especially to a kid with avionic dreams.

It was 1976 and Salmon was an eager beaver. It also didn't hurt that flight instruction rates were about $18 an hour, which included an instructor's time as well as the use of a plane. Nowadays, the cost is more like $130 an hour, with $35 to $45 for an instructor's time and $95 for the aircraft, Salmon said.

After he earned his pilot's license, Salmon's mother and grandmother got a kick out of riding shotgun. "They enjoyed it," he said, but his dad? Not so much. "Let's just say he's a very cautious man."

The elder Salmon didn't accompany his son on high until sometime around 2010.

Fast forward about four decades and history's repeating itself. Since starting Cape Copters in 2012 with his business partner, Dean Houseman, a helicopter mechanic, Salmon has taught his own share of eager little pilots-to-be -- even kids as young as 11.

"There's no limitation on when you can take lessons. You just have to be big enough to take the controls with an instructor present," he said.

Most of Salmon's and Houseman's clients are less pint-sized, however. As a Robinson helicopter dealership and flight school, the business mainly deals with private and commercial clients. About a third of the people who frequent the shop are hobbyists, but the rest are looking to change careers.

Many of them end up leading tours of exotic locales, such as the Alaskan wilderness, along the West Coast, around Las Vegas or in and around Florida. Some even zip all over the East Coast. Others ferry crew members to and from the oil rigs out in the Gulf of Mexico, and some work as crop dusters.

"You can make a lot of money crop dusting," Salmon said.

But when it comes to the money involved in buying, selling or repairing helicopters, Salmon really isn't in it for that. He makes a good living in his own right as an emergency room physician in Perryville, Missouri, and said he would be involved in flying even if it didn't earn him a dime.

Flying is, and probably always will be, his first love.