Gig Harbor flight school owner is recognized as an FAA Master Pilot

Mike Pickett started flying about 55 years after Orville Wright, but he kept at it a lot longer.

Picket, 81, who owns Pavco Aviation at the Tacoma Narrows Airport, has been a pilot for 62 years, ever since his first flight in an Air Force trainer back in 1958.

Ask him what airplanes he’s flown, and he can rattle them off like alphabet soup: C-47s, F-89s, F-101s, T33s, T37s, T38s, several different flavors of B-52s. In Vietnam, he flew “Spooky,” a C-47 cargo plane reconfigured as a gunship. Oh, and Cessnas. Lots of Cessnas.

“All I’ve ever wanted to do is fly,” he said. “And I’m still doing it.”

This Saturday, Pickett got a little extra credit for his time in the air. In a ceremony arranged as a surprise by his pilot buddies, he received The Wright Brothers Master Pilot Award, the most prestigious award the Federal Aviation Administration gives to general aviation pilots.

He admits it caught him flat-footed. “I don’t know how those guys managed to keep it a secret,” he said.

To qualify as a Master Pilot, an aviator must have at least 50 years in the sky with no accidents or regulatory actions against his license. According to the FAA, only about 1,600 pilots are on the list.

“It’s really a safety award, and I’m proud of that,” Pickett said.

Picket has run Pavco for 35 years, retiring after 20 years in the Air Force. It’s the biggest fixed-base operator at the Gig Harbor airport, and its flight school has 15 pilots who train scores of new young pilots every year, primarily for the airline industry.

“We’re approaching 200,000 flights since I’ve been here,” he said. “We’ve torn up a few airplanes, but we’ve never gotten anyone hurt. Not even a scratch.”

Pavco’s flight school offers all the certifications commercial pilots need, as well as a 4-year degree in aeronautics, offered through a partnership with Liberty University in Virginia. Many of its trainee pilots are veterans getting their training through the GI Bill.

“Something happens to a kid, even a teenage kid, when you hand him an $80,000 airplane and let him solo in it,” Pickett said. “He’s never done anything that in his life. It changes him. It even changes his personality. When you become a pilot you take on a load of responsibility. It makes you grow up quick.”

Pickett figures his school has “built” about 400 pilots for the aviation industry — for so long that some of his former students are already retired.

Asked if anything has changed in the 35 years he’s run the flight school, Pickett laughed.

“Are you kidding? Absolutely. It’s changing all the time, and we have to keep up. We began with what they now call ‘steam gauges’ — analog instrument dials — in the cockpit. Now we have the ‘all-glass’ cockpit,’ with heads-up displays and digital everything.”

Pavco has 16 airplanes, and Pickett keeps his hand in by flying them all in turn. He keeps his instructor rating up to date.

What’s his favorite aircraft?

“The one I’m in,” he said.