Story
Up to miss ‘Chief’
words mel jaunay
PHOTOGRAPHY sam kroepsch
Eighteen-year-old Alicia Hayes of Greenock swings her tall, slender form into the pilot’s seat of her grandfather’s blue and white single-engine Citabria.
Long blonde hair curled into an ‘Adelaide Biplanes’ cap, her young face remains composed as she dons her headset, pre-flight checks flowing through her mind in an unbroken chain, honed by hours of practice.
Brakes on, avionics off, mixture’s rich, mags both, fuel taps on…
It could have been the keys of a piano – rather than the instrument panel of an aircraft – that Alicia would go on to master, had Patrick Hayes not taken his six-year-old granddaughter up in his plane all those years ago, but as it turned out, Alicia was destined for the sky.
Altimeter set, throttle, ‘clear prop’, gauges, 1,000rpm, GO!
“Everything that’s on the ground is now on the ground,” says Alicia, reliving that transcendent moment of lift-off, which for her, never gets old.
“I’m not on the ground, so it doesn’t matter. It’s like a release. It’s so good. I genuinely forget everything that’s on the ground, so if I’ve had a bad day or whatever, as soon as I’m in the plane, the plane has started, it’s left behind.”
A dimple presses into her left cheek as she smiles widely – that same endearing smile her parents, Gregg and Lysanna said they saw on their daughter’s face the first time she went up.
Gregg’s father, Patrick, came late to flying himself. After raising five boys on a farm with his wife Rosemarie, in Padthaway, he finally decided at the age of 40 to get his private pilots’ licence, purchasing his first plane, the Citabria, about 20 years later.
Now aged 74, Alicia insists he “would be up there every day if he could”.
“He’s crazy about it,” she says with a grin, but then, so is she.
It’s no wonder her father affectionately calls her ‘Chief’ – short for ‘mischief’. She’s a thrill seeker and a leader in perfect balance.
Inspired by her early joy flights with Patrick, Alicia was 11-years-old when she took her first flying lesson.
At that stage, her parents were happy to pay for one lesson per term – the equivalent of an entire term’s worth of piano lessons, which Alicia willingly rescinded.
As she neared the age of 15, her training became more frequent, spending an hour a week repeating the same circuit and manoeuvres in the lead up to her first major flying milestone.
“You’re not allowed to go solo before you’re 15,” Alicia explains.
“First solo is a circuit – take off, come back around and land.”
Usually trainees don’t ‘go solo’ on the actual day of their 15th birthday, Alicia adds.
The day is too ominous, too loaded with pressure.
But, “It ended up being the perfect day,” she says with a playful roll of her eyes.
“Zero wind. My landings were good.
“Then all of a sudden my instructor was like, ‘make this one a full stop’.”
He exited on the ground, and then it was just Alicia and the plane, and the open sky ahead.
The short flight went like clockwork, the only difference being that she turned around at one point mid-air to see, with fleeting shock, the empty seat behind her.
“You’re so used to seeing someone, but there’s no one there,” she says.
“I came down and landed, and I probably had the biggest smile on – but Grandpa, Grandpa had a bigger smile than I did!”
“The Nullarbor Hotel, not many people know, but there’s an airstrip right at the back of it. I’ve landed there a couple of times. It’s pretty cool.”
- Alicia Hayes
A cross-generational bond forged a few thousand feet above sea level brings new meaning to the term ‘the sky’s the limit’.
Both grandfather and granddaughter have their aerobatics tickets and participate in air shows together.
Alicia made her debut at just 16 at Barossa Air Show in 2023.
“I had a few people come up and say, ‘great job’,” she recalls of the ‘star’ reaction she received back on the ground.
“I’m like, ‘oh!’ Because I often forget that flying isn’t a normal thing, especially at my age. It’s crazy to people.
“But for me it’s been there my whole life, so it’s a normal thing to go flying on a Saturday afternoon!”
And that’s exactly how life is for Alicia, who graduated from Sacred Heart College last year, and is now studying for her commercial pilot licence, while working locally as a cellar hand.
She and Patrick have the freedom to go places usually inhibited by distance and time, such as visiting one of Alicia’s three older siblings, Tyler, who works at an abalone farm on Kangaroo Island.
“We went over there for a coffee and just flew back home. Why not?” she chuckles.
There’s also a lap of Australia in progress, with granddaughter and grandfather setting off together in late May for two weeks of bunny-hopping from airstrip to airstrip, via Tasmania, all the way up to Cairns, across to Broome, Perth and the Nullarbor.
“The Nullarbor Hotel, not many people know, but there’s an airstrip right at the back of it. I’ve landed there a couple of times. It’s pretty cool,” says Alicia.
With close to 50 hours of flying time together in the relatively small confines of a cockpit, it could seem a test of the relationship, but Alicia has no qualms.
“He’s not really the traditional grandpa, he’s pretty close to my best friend,” she says of the young-at-heart Patrick.
“He acts like my age half the time, so we just get along so well, like you would think I would get along with someone else my age.”
For the times when conversation eases into comfortable silence, there’s music of all genres to fill the vast space between the sky and the ground.
“Genuinely everything!” Alicia says of her in-flight music taste.
“From country to ‘white girl’ music, to ‘dad rock’, to, I call it, ‘grandpa’ music. Literally everything!”
And the hours in the air are invaluable to Alicia’s long-term goals, which include one day flying for the Royal Flying Doctor Service, an organisation that feels close to her heart.
“Mum caught a ride with them when she was having Will and Tyler,” Alicia says of the premature birth of her twin brothers.
“Landing out in the middle of nowhere in the bush, that appealed to me, but also being able to help people in their darkest moment… When everything has gone bad, to just be able to get them (to help) as fast as possible.”
While she’s got a long way to go before she can earn those stripes, for Alicia, the journey is just as good as the destination.
“I need over 2,500 hours to even start thinking about going there… which I’m not complaining about!” she says.
“Every time I head up it’s a new and different experience.”
