A local pilot with a passion for flying hopes to help inspire a new generation to defy gravity and take to the skies.
Glen “Bruno” Bradley, who lives immediately west of town near the Sundre Airport, was the recipient of the Canadian Owners and Pilots Association (COPA) 2019 President’s Award.
The association, founded in 1952 to provide a unified voice for general aviation throughout the country, presents the top honour every year to the person or organization that has made a notable contribution to general aviation in Canada.
Bradley said flying clubs across the country are struggling to maintain their numbers as fewer and fewer young people pursue lessons.
“With the shortages across our entire nation, with pilots, we’re in desperate shape to get our youth more involved,” he said.
“Canada’s just horribly short on pilots.”
Involved with COPA for Kids, Bradley said whenever the opportunity presents itself he takes young people up to experience the exhilarating thrill of getting airborne.
“That’s basically the big joy for me, is sharing the experience of flying,” he said, adding he hopes to inspire them to think about a potential career path that many of them might never have even previously considered.
“Being able to share this, that’s my big rush.”
Bradley considers the ability to fly a gift to conquer gravity that has been available to humans for barely a few generations out of tens of thousands of years of history.
“There ain’t a damn thing we can do about death or taxes, but we can kick the hell out of gravity every now and again,” he said, smiling.
Bradley also enjoys being able to share aerial photography, and recently offered members of the Sundre Camera Club their first opportunity to experience taking pictures of the Rockies from a bird’s-eye view.
Being named this year’s recipient of COPA’s President’s Award was “a high honour” that he said left him “absolutely dumbfounded. The thought never crossed my mind.”
Originally from the Yukon, Bradley earned his licence to fly in 1992 in Whitehorse over the course of the winter with a company called Aerocon Aviation, which has since gone out of business, he said.
“Aircraft and the bush are just a way of life” in the Yukon, he said, adding there are essentially only two major roads into the territory.
“If you want to get anywhere or want to see anything, you got to fly.”
With approximately 1,100 hours of flight time under his belt in North America, Bradley said at one point when he was working out east he took a sabbatical from flying between about 2009 and 2015 to explore drag racing, which he called “city boys’ tractor pulling.”
But he eventually found himself drawn back into the world of aviation.
Bradley now owns a Canadian-made Custom Flight North Star Super Cub as well as a modified Cessna Skylark 175, which are housed at the Sundre Airport and is a member of the Sundre Flying Club COPA Flight 146.
Local airports like Sundre’s, he said, generate an important economic spinoff for the whole community.
He received the award last month during the organization’s national convention that was hosted at the Big Bend Airport near Innisfail and attended by Rimbey-Rocky Mountain House-Sundre MLA Jason Nixon.
Bradley praised Alberta’s new minister of Environment and Parks for his effort to stop the former NDP government’s proposed Bighorn Country plan, which he said would have seriously stifled the area’s airspace for small planes by “basically fencing off the skies.”
“We just about lost everything,” he said.
Had the plan moved ahead, pilots would, for example, have been restricted from landing on lakes as well as flying over mountain peaks, forcing them to plot courses around the entire region, he said.
“When it comes to being stewards of the land, we are the strictest people out there — the only thing we leave behind is just tire tracks,” he said, adding skis can be mounted on small planes to land on frozen bodies of water.
“These are the last free mountains in our province,” he said, adding that might not have been the case if not for Nixon fighting as hard as he did.
Bradley also expressed gratitude for COPA, which advocates tirelessly for the freedom to fly and lobbies the bureaucracies that “tighten the noose around all of us. As a single individual, I can’t defend myself against government red tape. They’re tougher than I am!” he said.
“Without them, I firmly believe that we would have lost the vast majority of our rights to fly by now,” he said.
“Without them, we would turn into Europe.”
