Picture if you will a military bomber flying low enough to squeeze between Asheville City Hall and another government building. The aircraft, banked at 60 degrees, “buzzed the tower” similar to the daring stunt that Tom Cruise’s character Maverick performs in the “Top Gun” movies.
Only this is not fiction. There is a monument to this pilot and this August 14, 1943 event in downtown Asheville.
Robert Morgan ’36 had returned home as a war hero, only seven years after graduating from Christ School. He was flying the Memphis Belle on a national tour to sell war bonds when Robert made a pass through town on his way to another stop in Ohio.
Maybe not to this extreme, but Robert’s fearless confidence and spirit live on in the fourth year of a high school aviation program in his name, and one of only three like it in the United States.
The Robert Morgan '36 Aviation Program is completely full this winter with 13 Greenies training under former U.S. Navy pilot and World Languages Teacher, Les Thornbury, as well as the staff at Western North Carolina Aviation (owned by Charles and Amy Thomas P’21).
“I’m always surprised by the amount of young kids who come in, so are the instructors over there at (WNC Aviation),” Les said.
“They can’t believe that they’re flying with a cadre of 15-year-olds, we even have one boy who is 14. They’re flying so young and just like anything, what a great time to learn. If you can learn when you’re an early teen and follow through, these kids are going to be great pilots.”
To accommodate ever-growing interest in the program, this is the second year of a partnership between the school and WNC Aviation, which is based out Asheville Regional Airport.
Greenies fly on Tuesdays and Fridays, attend a ground school class on Wednesdays, and have unlimited access to an on-campus flight simulator and one housed at WNC Aviation. In between, they train through what is called Pilot Institute, offering a full online training curriculum.
“It was really grassroots when we started and now it’s much more of a metered operation,” Les said.
“It’s a lot more robust with a lot more going on. Apart from just being able to handle the bandwidth, to have a proper flight school handling us is just incredible. There’s an academic piece, the flying piece, and there's the simulators. So, a lot of the instructors are coming back to me and saying, ‘these kids can really fly,’ and I think it’s because they’re spending so much time on the sims. They go in there on the weekends, they sneak behind me when I’m teaching class. They know what everything looks like so when they line up for the runway, they know I’m too high, I’m too low. The instructors always say the kids have such great instincts for low-time pilots and the sims have a lot to do with it.”
Boys involved in the aviation program this year are Andrew Carson ’28, JT Duchac ’28, David Gaines ’26, Easton Hoffert ’26, Eric Li ’26, Connor Linn ’28, Richard Magruder ’28, Nick Michaelides ’28, Talin Patel ’27, Jude Ramirez ’29, Bowen Scheurer ’27, James Trainer ’30, and Trey Williams ’30.