Cassidy Blake, from Prescott, paints on the airplane her dreams of a healthy, happy, addiction free life during the Hope Takes Flight event at Legend Aviation Saturday morning.
Addiction science, aviation and art flew together at Legend Aviation's open house event on Saturday, Oct. 17. Put together in a manner similar to a community block party to thank customers, the open house also had an event within the event called Hope Takes Flight. Sponsored by Legend Aviation, MATFORCE and SafeLaunch, an organization based in Santa Barbara, California that works with parents and teens to prevent addiction, kids participated in an interactive lesson about addiction science and painted their dreams onto an airplane used in airshows.
The open house came about due to Legend Aviation changing fuel vendors and wanting to thank the customers who buy fuel from the fixed base operator, said General Manager Tom Juliani.
"If you work all day in one place on the airport, you can't go and meet the people who work all day on another place," he said. "This way, we can mix."
Hope Takes Flight became part of the open house after Sally Schindel approached Juliani to have it at the airport, he said. But instead of holding it on a random day, Juliani had the idea to include it in the open house so there would be more exposure.
In the two years of educating kids and having them paint their dreams on a single engine airplane, this is the first time SafeLaunch has done it in Arizona, Schindel said. After learning about SafeLaunch's Wind Beneath Our Wings program, which places names and ages of those who didn't live to full adulthood because of substance abuse underneath the wing of the plane the kids paint on, Schindel submitted the name and story of her son, Andy, who died of substance abuse a year and a half ago. Andy was 31 years old.
"When I saw the picture and I thought of my son flying and educating, it gave me a new memory with my son," she said. "My son's gone and I hang on to those old memories because you don't get to create new ones, but doing this created a new memory and it just made me feel so good."
The children were greatly enjoying themselves with the lesson and painting as well as checking out the rest of the open house and climbing into a helicopter or airplane, Schindel said. Though it wasn't just the kids as adults approached Schindel to thank her for the drug education.
More than 200 kids and parents have been educated about addiction risk said SafeLaunch cofounder Janet Rowse. She noted her hopes that
the lesson sticks with them like the paint on the plane.
As for the plane itself, it gets a lot of attention once its landed at an airport with all the artwork on it.
"The people that are around the airport see it live and completely in color, they go 'what's that' and 'what have you done to your plane,' Rowse said. "One of our friends says 'oh it's the happy plane, they're back."
Two names were added underneath the wing on Saturday, Schindel said, noting they were from local families. They belong to the Waite family and the Martin family. There's room for about 200 names underneath the wings and Schindel wants more families to feel comfortable putting the names there. It allows the loved ones to educate, fly and do important work beyond their lifespans, Schindel said.
Much of the artwork on the plane was hearts and rainbows, Rowse said, adding that the idea behind the painting is to break the silence.
"A lot of people are not quite as strong as Sally and aren't able to talk about it when they've lost a child and so, there's a lot of reasons why people don't want to or can't," Rowse said. "But it's really important that people talk about it because if we don't talk about it, it's just going to keep happening."
- Source: http://dcourier.com
No comments:
Post a Comment