Chris Kappler Turns Flying Obsession into Soaring Sideline Business.
How a chance encounter with a discerning pilot changed a 15-year-old’s life forever.
Courtesy of Wild Blue Adventure Company
Chris Kappler (inset) does a loop-de-loop over West Virginia’s New River Gorge for a Wild Blue Adventure customer in his restored 1943 Boeing Stearman. With each aerial tour, pilot Chris Kappler is transformed into a World War II flying ace.
Fifteen-year-old Chris Kappler was visiting relatives in Oahu in the summer of 1985 when he returned to the glider port where he’d taken a ride the year before. Handing the pilot a $20 bill to hitch a few tows behind the plane, he was surprised when the man said, “Hey, you were here last year. You still want to do this, or would you rather learn how to fly?”
By the end of the day, Kappler was flying solo. “I can see your enthusiasm, and I think you’re going to be a great pilot someday,” the airfield’s owner told him, refusing to take any money for the day’s instruction. “I hope this changes your life.”
“And it did,” says Kappler, 48, now an air ambulance pilot and founder of Wild Blue Adventure Co., a biplane tour company in Fayetteville, West Virginia. Of the glider pilot’s generosity, he adds, “It’s something I try to pay forward now.”
A fast talker who describes himself as enthusiastic, inquisitive and “the guy who drives the good idea bus,” Kappler traces his lifelong obsession with antique planes to the models his dad built and hung over his crib when he was a baby.
Growing up in Los Angeles, Kappler loved to spend time at the small airfields dating back to the heyday of the Hollywood motion picture industry in the 1920s and ‘30s.
“Some kids go to the ballpark and watch their favorite baseball player playing ball, and some kids go hang on the fence at the airport and dream of being Charles Lindbergh someday. And I was the latter,” says Kappler, recalling a postcard depicting a B17 bomber that he picked out to send to his aunt when he was just 3. “It’s such an uncanny, almost overwhelming interest in aviation and vintage airplanes.”
Despite his passion, and his adventurous heritage—“We really come from pioneer stock,” Kappler says, rattling off stories of family members who fought in the Revolutionary War, sailed around the world, and climbed the Alps—he earned a marine science degree because, he says, there weren’t any solid aviation opportunities at the time. For a while, he flew helicopters on fire fighting missions in the mountains of Montana, but Kappler knew the job was ultimately too “transient” for his growing family.
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