Anchorage's Merrill Field was buzzing with planes taking off and landing, as about a hundred people gathered to celebrate the launch of a new aviation nonprofit.
Jordan Lewis from Chefornak was one of several young students in the crowd. At 22, he’s already earned a private pilot’s license and has over 250 hours of flight time. And he dreams even bigger.
“I want to fly for the big airlines one day,” he said. “But my small goal is to fly for, like, the rural villages first.”
Lewis said he became interested in aviation because his grandfather was a village airline agent, and he’d follow him to meet the planes.
“There's like hundreds and hundreds of villages that aren't on the road system,” he said. “I believe if it wasn't for aviation, most of those villages wouldn't continue to exist.”
Teaching aviation to kids from rural Alaska
Lewis took aviation classes through a career training organization called Alaska EXCEL. Those classes have been offered for about eight years through different local organizations. But instructors say the new nonprofit, called the Paneok Project, will help them get funding more reliably and make classes more sustainable.
Through Paneok, students from rural Alaska can enroll in piloting, maintenance and ground-handling courses, as well as get mentorship and career opportunities. The program might offer a dispatcher course soon, too.
“It is very important for us to put rural kids in these positions because they do understand the terrain and the weather,” said Jamie Klaes, the founder and chair of Paneok. “And they have an invested interest in the community and the people they're flying.”
Klaes is a pilot and instructor, originally from Bettles in Interior Alaska. She said she started teaching aviation classes because it’s hard for rural Alaskans to get jobs in the industry, even though they rely on it.
Since then, instructors have worked with Alaska organizations and school districts to help connect students to aviation classes, and in some cases travel to Anchorage to attend them. Klaes said the classes had up to 200 students enrolled at one time.
“If we get one kid that gets their pilot's license, you know, from Chevak, all of a sudden, we have a lot of Chevackers applying,” Klaes said. “You can see the impact of not only the student that got their license and their confidence, but their whole community and the confidence of their peers.”
But Klaes said enrollment dropped to just 50 students two years ago, after some partnering organizations lost federal funding and had to cut their support for the classes. So she decided to form Paneok.
“I didn't ever want to see this program stop,” Klaes said. “So I needed to do something that was going to help it grow.”
Honoring Ellen Paneok
Klaes named Paneok in honor of Ellen Paneok, the first Alaska Native woman to become a licensed pilot. Paneok died in 2008, but her family flew from across the state and country to celebrate the nonprofit’s launch.
“I’m pretty proud,” said Lottie Jones from Utqiagvik, Paneok’s aunt. “I'm glad that she's recognized because it took a lot for her to pursue her dream.”
Sen. Lisa Murkowski also attended the event. She said Paneok was not only a pilot but also an ivory carver, a writer and a mentor.
“This is Ellen,” Murkowski said. “A woman who believed so much in what she had to offer and then was willing to pay that forward to help so many others, and particularly young Native kids from the villages, those who needed to be encourage.d”
Murkowski commended the program leaders for their work to meet the needs of Alaska's growing aviation sector.
“It's not just the young pilots,” Murkowski said. “It is the ground handlers. It is the mechanics that keep everybody in the air safe. It's the whole ecosystem of aviation that is so desperately needed in this place where we fly more than anybody else.”
But Joelle Kamkoff from Kotlik, 17, said she wants to be a pilot.
“I dream of working in medevac because I get to help people, and that makes me feel good,” she said. “And also, like, being in the plane and in the air clears my mind.”
For a start, Kamkoff took a ground handling class through the program last spring to learn how to fuel and load an airplane.
