Youth: Four-Way Birthday

In 35 of the United States, a boy’s 16th birthday is a mighty milestone: he becomes eligible for a driver’s license. But for the boy of the future, age 16 may be a quadruple milestone—as it was last week for Gregory Potter, who celebrated his birthday by qualifying to drive not only cars, but also single-engined planes, twin-engined planes and helicopters.

A slight and bespectacled young man, Gregory arrived at Seattle’s Boeing Field Airport last Sunday with his car license already in hand. The FAA inspectors had obligingly arranged to give him his three airborne tests in close succession as part of Boeing Field’s weekly air show.

First came the single-engined-plane test; aloft for little more than ten minutes, Gregory brought the red and white Cessna-150 to a perfect, gentle stop, shook hands with a newspaperman (“That boy’s palm was barely moist,” he reported to the crowd), and bounded on to the twin-engined-plane test. The red, white and black Aztec swooped without a tremor to the skies, made a landing the pilot’s mother called “soft as a marshmallow,” and was welcomed to earth by a drum-and-bugle corps that sounded a fast fanfare. Gregory fidgeted; a bystander, he said, had fiddled with the plane’s gasoline tank cap, but “there was nothing to worry about, I probably only lost two or three gallons.”

Onward he went, this time to wheel a helicopter up and out of view, and back again. A helicopter is a perverse and difficult craft; a pilot has to use both hands and feet, and even the pros consider them miserable things to handle. “This fellow did a masterly job,” said FAA Supervisor Joe Princen. Said Gregory: “I am probably supposed to have been nervous, but I wasn’t.”

Gregory’s father runs an airplane taxi company, and his mother is an accomplished pilot, as is an older brother. Even his twelve-year-old brother David can fly the family Aztecs, although the law insists a pilot be 16 before he can solo. Gregory’s window overlooks the Potter family helipad, and he is now empowered to take out the family chopper any time. This puts him one up on his father, who has not got around to taking that test yet.