<<
Back to main Flying Stories page ......................................................Back
to main Flash website
PROFILES
Kathy Birkhofer, Prairie Dog
May 8, 1997
You see them at every airshow, the star-struck kids with their dreams
of flight. Your heart goes out and you walk them around your airplane.
Sometimes you even take them flying, but mostly you just hope they
make it into the air the way you finally did. Kathy Birkhofer, known
in airshow circles as, Prairie Dog, was one of those kids in 1973.
Today her place is in the world of twins and taildraggers, FBO’s
and airshows.
When she was 6-year-old, in Quincy, Illinois she lay on top of the
family car, with her arms crossed under her head and watched the Blue
Angels’ F-4’s fly low overhead, making every bone in her
body hum like a tuning fork and she knew, “That’s what
I’m going to do.”
From then on she begged to go to the airport just to hang out. Since
her family had no interest in flying, they often discouraged her
Every pilot in a non-flying family thinks she was adopted. Kathy
actually was. Sometimes she thought that if she found her original
parents it would explain some of her yearnings. After all, everyone
in her adopted family shared interests and talents with each other
that they didn’t share with her, so maybe she would find the
same thing with her own birth parents. However, she knew the risks
of stirring up the past and she had plenty to do earning the money
for college.
When she arrived at college she approached the Air Force recruiter.
“If my vision is corrected to 20-20 can I fly in the Air Force?”
she asked.
“Nope,” he said. “It’s got to be 20-20.”
“When I put in my contacts my vision is 20-20, so, what’s
the difference?”
He shook his head. “It doesn’t work that way. Your vision
will get worse, so why not start with it perfect?”
It was a last straw of sorts.
The way she felt watching the Blue Angels had been so profound. It
was that feeling you get when the clouds part in your mind and you
see your own limitless horizons. You know you are going to do that
thing because you see it so clearly. You know you are unstoppable.
Since age six and she thought that feeling meant her route to fly
was through the military. She had counted on it for 12 years, in spite
of what people told her.
Could she have been wrong? She thought back. Everyone must have thought
it was cute taking her to the airport when she was little. People
humored her, but as she grew up they actually undermined her. You’re
too short. Girls can’t do that. They don’t fly on jet
teams! You can’t get in the military. Your eyes aren’t
good enough.
She put her head down and focused on putting herself through college,
maintaining high grades, getting married, managing a house and minding
a newborn son. Her flying dream slipped into the background until
her son got older.
“Something was missing,” she says. “It started
to bug me. I wanted my son to know his grandparents, his aunts and
uncles, to know what he had in common with them. I felt a deep sadness.”
Digging into the past was worth it.
It took two years, enormous courage and extremely creative research
to find her father, but when she did she found someone who understood
her and the love of flying.
Six Blue Angels inspired her to fly in 1973. When she found her dad
in 1995 she found a seventh one, and he showed her how to do it.
Her father, Jack Ekl, was a Blue Angel from 1979 through 1981. He
started flying at age 15. He flew fighters in Vietnam and told her
that often, while he sat in his jet waiting to fly, he thought of
that tiny blue-eyed baby he had to give up. Later at Southwest Airlines,
as chief pilot and in the Air Force Reserves, flying F-16’s
he actively promoted women pilots flying fighters and airliners. Imagine
his excitement to discover he had a grown daughter eager to fly. Among
his younger four daughters only one had shown much interest in flying.
Finding Kathy was a dream come true for him.
Of course you can fly, he told her.
And, so she did. After 22 years of longing, she found the key to
her dream—a dad who believed in her. Within a month she was
in the air.
In Kathy’s background, women didn’t do the kinds of thing
she wanted to do, so Jack knew the importance of good female role
model. He suggested she move to Houston to fly with Deb Lane, a first
class instructor.
In two months later Kathy had her private license, her first aerobatic
lessons and a taste for airshows.
In addition to flying airliners and F-16’s, Jack flies the
Bud Light Air Force’s BD5 Jet. It is tiny, fast and just Kathy’s
style. At Reese AFB in Lubbock that first summer he let her taxi it
solo.
“There’s something about that airplane,” she says.
“It has so much personality. I could see myself hopping in it
and taking off.”
Someone told Jack he was pretty brave to let her do that. He laughed.
“I have her out there where she can’t hit anything.”
As soon as he said that Big B, the ground crew chief, signaled her
to taxi it down the flight line, past the Thunderbird’s jets,
right in front of the crowd. He may have held his breath, but she
taxied it like a pro.
Now, two years after she first met her had, she has her commercial
license with instrument, multi-engine and CFI ratings, a tailwheel
endorsement and a zest for anything with wings.
A father/daughter airshow team seems like a natural step, but Kathy
also wants to do it all—instruct, fly cargo, fly airliners and
run an FBO and Jack encourages her to do it. She loves aerobatics
but she paces herself, taking the aerobatic lessons as the reward
for other flying goals achieved.
During the last year she helped her dad and Scott Lesh put together
the Viper Jet Aerobatic Team with three Fougas. While she builds experience
she is announcer, manager, ground coordinator and back seat flier.
At other shows she assist with the Bud Light Jet . That is where she
earned her nickname, Prairie Dog.
“At the end of the first airshow season in Roswell, New Mexico,”
she says. “I was on the 500 foot line shooting off the pyro.
The last thing my dad did was make a pass over my head, so low that
it parted my hair. I ducked into the sage brush and the ant hills.
When he landed he laughed, ‘You looked like a prairie dog out
there.’” Aerobatic champion Leo Loudenslager, who flies
the Bud Light Laser, picked up the name and dubbed her, Prairie Dog,
perfect irony for a tiny, beautiful, blue-eyed brunette who has boundless
energy and enthusiasm for flight.
<<
Back to main Flying Stories page ......................................................Back
to main Flash website
