A young woman from Webster is helping other young women reach new heights in aviation. Erin Cournoyer has been flying since she was only five years old, zooming around the skies in her father’s single engine plane. Now 20 years old she is graduating from Purdue with her Bachelors in Aviation Technology this May and will immediately pursue her Masters in Airport Administration. Flying is a labor of love for Cournoyer and she has been grabbing at every brass ring on her radar. (And a diamond one too!)
For all three of her collegiate summers she has been involved in the Women’s Air Race. This unique event is a contest that involves a multi-leg jaunt across the country, a ground crew for support and 2 women pilots who gain race points by topping out over their plane’s assessed top speed. Cournoyer explained, “They judge you on the handicap. Ours is 106. Say we fly at 110 knots at ground speed, we get 4 over the handicap. And another is assessed at 110 and it flies at 112 knots. They are not as fast, comparatively.
The race is a hop between seven different airfields beginning at Fort Meyer’s Fl, and finishing at Fredrick Municipal Airport in Md. Cournoyer is an experienced part of the ground crew so she is working to train the other members on to how to calculate optimum altitude and power levels. Weather is a key factor which can help or hinder your speed. All the planes have a top speed that can be exceeded by catching tailwinds. Winds should be used for extra speed and lift. That is when teams start to score points.
“We use a Warrior, Generally the planes in the race will be single engine. The race is VFR which stands for visual flight rules. That usually limits the altitudes you can fly to. It wouldn’t make sense to take a turbo prop or a jet on a race like this because they perform well at a higher altitude. They generally tend to be small single engine planes.
A lot of single engines, have a low power service. If you want a prop engine to perform at a high altitude it would have to be turbo charged because it sacrifices too much of the ground speed to get up to altitude,” explained Cournoyer. The captain is always last years’ copilot so pilots commit for two years. The club advisor and captain choose the copilot.
Cournoyer used winter break to visit her fiancée’s family in Detroit. She also comes back to Webster once or twice a year to visit her family. Her roots go deep in the area. She called herself “The little girl at the flying club” as she fondly recalled memories of the Williamson Sodus Airport.
Her dad still stores his plane at the Williamson-Sodus Airport and is a member of the flying club there. “They do a lot of fun things. As part of the apple blossom Festival out in Ontario, they do a fly in breakfast,” she said. Fly-in Pancake Breakfast is a popular fundraising idea for small airfields and flying clubs. Her Aviation club at Purdue also holds one in the spring.
“I know that she enjoyed going to the airfield from when she was a little girl. At 11 or 12 years old they voted to make her a full member of the club. It has been there for 50 years. The fact that this club of mostly gentlemen expected her to be a contributing member of the club, the fact that she loved flying and the fact that she was accepted into the club all contributed. When she soloed and got her license at 16 and 17, I think, was when I really knew that she wanted to do this.
Erin Cournoyer said, “I think the fact that I love teaching comes from her and flying comes from my dad.” Erin weighed in on some of the major issues that face the airline industry today.
“A change I’d love to see is pilots getting longer rest hours. Now they get 8 hours, which includes travel to and from the airport, meals and any other activities. One thing I would like to see - and it seems to be going this way with new legislation in congress - I think they need more rest hours and a better salary.
“I’m sure you’ve heard a lot from the Buffalo press, with them being so close by, that the pilots were extremely fatigued when the plane crashed in Clarence. You might have heard that the copilot was making $18000 an year. I would like to see that change and the safety practice change, but airlines are very, very safe. They’ve taken many measures to make it safe.
“A lot of people are afraid of flying because they think it’s dangerous. People think it’s dangerous because when an accident happens, it’s a huge catastrophe and many lives are involved but really, it’s one of the safest ways to travel.
Ellen Cournoyer might be worried, with her daughter taking so many flights but she said, “I’m more nervous when she’s driving from Rochester NY, to West Lafayette Indiana. It’s an over 600 mile drive and that makes me more nervous than her flying.”
Erin discussed the recent problems the airlines have had with security: “There have been breaches of security, but as long as planes are still flying, someone can always find a way to breech security. Someone can always be smart and find a way through. It could happen in another country that we have little control over. I agree that people have their rights to privacy with the scanners, but at the same time people need to be taking more security measures to make it safer.”