At the Bob Hoover Academy in Salinas, students take the pilot’s seat -- and earn a high school diploma.

The genesis of the Bob Hoover Academy, an alternative high school in Salinas where students can learn how to fly and fix planes, was inspired by a metaphor: taking flight, and being in control while soaring.

It’s something academy founder Sean Tucker, a world-renowned acrobat pilot who got his start as a crop duster in the Salinas Valley in the early 1970s, has experienced firsthand.

“I’ve flown in front of 200 million people,” Tucker says of his career. “I’ve seen how dancing in the sky inspires people.”

Bob Hoover is another aviation legend and was Tucker’s mentor. So Tucker named the academy after him. But the academy’s students aren’t learning to fly like acrobats. The idea is that learning how to fly helps the students feel empowered to shape their own destiny, and maybe even helps launch them into a career.

“There are super well-paid jobs in aviation right now, and it’s going to be that way for the next 30 years,” Tucker points out. “We’re in a perfect storm to help these young men and women.”

Tucker has an almost evangelical enthusiasm for the power and joy of flight and its ability to change lives: “Once [the students] get it and that light bulb goes off, they never go back.”

The academy is a donor-funded nonprofit – its biggest donor is actor Harrison Ford, who Tucker coached as a pilot – but it’s partnered with the Monterey County Office of Education, which provides the academy with teachers and classrooms where its students take all the classes they need to earn a high school degree. When possible, the curriculum is blended with lessons about the physics of flight.

The academy originally started as an after-school program for Rancho Cielo, another alternative high school program in Salinas focused on training students in trades like culinary arts and refrigeration technology. But in 2016, Bob Hoover became its own school, and MCOE is currently finishing the construction of two classrooms at the Salinas Airport that are expected to be completed when the next school year starts this August. When completed, the entire school – its classrooms, and its planes and flight simulator – will finally all be housed under one roof. (Currently, students attend classes in a nearby MCOE building.)

“This program is the best-kept secret in Salinas, but we don’t want it to be a secret,” says MCOE Superintendent Deneen Guss. “I think the more opportunities our kids have for hands-on learning, the better. ”

Guss’ embrace of the program has been music to Tucker’s ears. “For bureaucrats to allow us to teach kids to fly is really brave,” he says. “No other community in the country is doing a program like this.”

Guss fondly recalls when she was first running for superintendent in 2018, she saw Ford visiting students at the academy. While talking to the students about flying, and life, it became so emotional for him, Guss says, “he went to tears, and had to step away for a few minutes.”

There are 15 students enrolled in the academy, but Stacy Wilson, the academy’s operations manager, says the new classrooms will provide capacity for 40. She also emphasizes that any high school student in the county can choose to enroll in the academy. Wilson explains the goals are threefold: to teach students how to work on airplanes – top-flight mechanics volunteer to teach them on that end; to enable to them to earn a high school diploma; and, of course, to teach how to fly. But, Wilson adds, “We’re not a flight school necessarily. We’re using flight as a carrot to show people what they can do.”

In an adjacent hangar is the academy’s Cessna 152, along with other planes that have been donated for students to work on. Eduardo Alonso, a senior at the academy who’s been attending for three years and has already logged 25 flights, goes through a pre-flight inspection with flight instructor Bentley Mundle, one of two that work for the school.

After about 20 minutes of inspecting the plane’s vitals, Alonso and Mundle climb in, and Alonso steers it down the taxiway, out of sight, before eventually taking flight.