A new flight school at Durango’s Animas Air Park is preparing for takeoff.
J.D. Parsons founded DarkHorse Aviation, which provides training services and private flights for travel and tourism, in 2022. It first operated at Durango-La Plata County Airport but is currently reestablishing itself at Animas Air Park.
Pilot Mario Torres-Leon said despite offering training since its founding, DarkHorse hasn’t been the most vocal about its programs. But now it is ready to elevate business – and community interest in flight school – to the next level.
Parsons said Animas Air Park is facing a possible drop in pilots because older generations of pilots are getting too old to fly. DarkHorse Aviation Flight School aims to introduce a new generation of pilots to the thrill of aviation before the local culture tailspins.
“There’s a whole generation of aviators here that are slowly either getting out of aviation – maybe they can’t get their medical anymore to fly, or, you know, things happen in life in general,” he said. “There’s this older generation that’s kind of phasing out. And if there’s no one coming up, then it kind of ceases to exist.”
Parsons’ family homesteaded in the Durango area, and he had no clue about the abilities he could develop as a pilot until he took an interest in flying. He said his mission is to get the community more involved with Animas Air Park and to share the joy of flying.
He said he is working with Colorado Timberline Academy and other high schools to develop programming for school-age flight students.
When Parsons first started flying at Animas Air Park, many of the hangars and buildings at the air park were empty of airplanes, he said. It used to be cheaper to rent a hangar for use as office or storage space than to rent an actual office in town, and many of the buildings were used for storage unrelated to aviation.
Durango Flight Tours owner Bruce Ordiorne II, who operates next door to DarkHorse and is contemplating a training partnership with the fledgling flight school, said many of the warehouses at Animas Air Park are still void of aviation-related activities.
But recently, Parsons said, he has seen an increased interest in flying. He wants DarkHorse to be a front-and-center conduit for channeling that interest and producing new pilots.
DarkHorse offers a range of training programs that allow students to attain private pilot certifications, instrument rating and commercial ratings, in addition to Certified Flight Instructor I and II certificates.
Sixty percent to 70% of DarkHorse’s students are pursuing their private pilot certificates, which allows them to fly themselves and their families, he said.
“They just want to make the world a little bit smaller, and they want to buy a plane,” he said. “They want to fly their family around, so they’re going to get their private, (and) maybe their instrument rating. But they don’t really have the ambitions to go to the airliners.”
The academic pathway starts with earning one’s student certificate and leads to a private certificate, the aviation equivalent of a driver’s license, he said. If one wants, he or she can continue to earn his or her instrument rating, which allows flight in class A airspace, or 18,000 feet mean sea level up to and including 60,000 feet.
From there, one can work toward his or her commercial certification, which opens the door to flying for pay. Lastly, one can earn a CFI and CFI Instrument (CFII), which qualifies one to teach others how to earn their certifications.
“It’s a journey, for sure,” Parsons said. “And we’ve got people that are in all stages of that journey. We have some students that have come to us that already had their private (certification) to work on their instrument. … We pick them up at all stages.”
Parsons said the “beautiful thing” about the aviation community is it’s tight-knit.
“Everybody understands the journey,” he said.
He said people can visit other pilots in their hangars whenever they like to talk and learn from each other, and that sense of community is why he decided to move DarkHorse to Animas Air Park.
DarkHorse has two flight instructors for upcoming summer courses and it is in the process of recruiting a third. DarkHorse Chief Flight Instructor Ron Johnson said he has about 12,000 hours of flight time. Another instructor, Ray Malik, who was Johnson’s instructor years ago, has about 20,000 hours.
Combined, in addition to another instructor Johnson hopes to recruit, the flight school’s summer courses would have over 50,000 hours of combined experience.
Johnson said despite the dozens of instruments and radios such as compasses, gyroscopic radiant turn coordinators, altitude gauges, air and vertical speedometers, automatic direction finders and other dials, he actually stresses the importance of directly scanning the skies with one’s eyes.
New student flyers tend to become fixated on the dials and gauges on the dashboard. But the instruments are there to assist a pilot, not to serve as his or her sole means of navigation, he said.
He said he wants his students to gain an understanding of an aircraft’s positioning and maneuverability by getting accustomed to movement and orientation, including when an aircraft’s nose is level or tilted upward or downward.
In a flight, Johnson demonstrated several simple exercises, starting with navigation and steering on a runway, followed by takeoff, and then performing maneuvers such as vertical climbing and 360-degree turns. Before initiating a turn, he briefly raised the plane’s wings to get a better visual of the horizon, ensuring the path was clear.
After just a short time in the air, Navajo Lake in Northern New Mexico was visible in the distance. Johnson said he likes to quiz his students on the layout of the landscape below. Inexperienced flyers are often confounded; it takes time and practice to familiarize oneself with area geography when looking at it from an all-new vantage point.
Parsons said if one can fly and land in the mountains around Durango, he or she can basically fly anywhere.
“Mountains can actually generate their own kind of weather system,” Johnson said. “Predominantly, the winds come from the west. You kind of get up in some of the mountains and it’ll all of a sudden turn around, come from the east. The higher you go, the less oxygen is available for the engine to breathe,” he said. “ … So you have to plan your routes.”
Parsons said he has realized Animas Air Park is a unique place to learn how to fly because of its altitude of 6,684 feet above sea level. He’s flown with other pilots who were trained under different conditions and he’s noticed they are underprepared for mountain flying.
“On a hot summer day, the density altitude can be 11,000 feet, which means it’s almost as if you were taking off at 11,000 feet,” he said. “There’s a lot of really unique things that we can teach here, and that’s what we want to be able to do.”
Johnson said DarkHorse is planning for a mountain flying course for late July or early August.
cburney@durangoherald.com
