Francois Leh jumps on a skateboard and sails over the concrete in front of two Cessna 172s in the Glacier Air hangar. It is a stormy day and flights are grounded at the Squamish Airport, but Leh, chief flight instructor, never wastes time staring out the window.
Between flights and classes, he keeps busy with the skateboard – which isn’t your average skateboard, rather an articulated board for a greater balance challenge – or he plays hacky sack with fellow instructors.
“I have done this since I got into flying full-time,” he said of his hacky sack hobby. “I always played with a little ball to stay coordinated and to stay alert, and in between flights, what it does is activate your circulation.”
Although he is modest about his many accomplishments, Leh acknowledged he is actually an amateur hacky sack champion who made it to the finals of the 2003 World Footbag Championships in Prague, Czech Republic.
He also has five decades in the air to his credit, but Leh, 70, said his goal was never specifically to be a pilot; he simply wanted to fly.
“I tried all kinds of things. I tried the umbrella, I modified that,” he said of his early attempts at flight as a child. “I always wanted to fly, but I was a minimalist.”
In his 20s, Leh flew hang gliders and eventually instructed others.
“When I saw that hang gliders exist and you can fly for cheaper and it is real flying – you actually steer yourself through the air – I figured this was more my kind of line,” he said. “You hang on, you run off the cliff.”
Eventually Leh, who once took courses in mathematical physics at McGill University, graduated from flying gliders to ultralights. During the 1980s, he moved on to flying regular airplanes.
Squamish is a unique place to fly, he said.
“To be safe, you have to know the weather,” he said. “Here with the winds, the weather, you have to be vigilant, and so you get to be a better pilot by training here.”
The access to the backcountry and to the large Vancouver airport is also a bonus of flying from Squamish.
“We have the best of both worlds,” he said.
The area around Squamish has many mountains to avoid, Leh said with a laugh, so that is great for people learning to fly.
People come from all over to train in Squamish, Leh said, a fact that is not well known by the general public.
Rather than being called a pilot, Leh prefers the term “aviator.”
“Some of us have the joy of flying. It is not a job. We are curious about why the plane flies, in depth. I guess I am one of those guys.”
Leh, who was born in Austria and raised in France, has lived in several places around the world, including in California, Hawaii and the Swiss Alps.
More than an aviator, Leh thinks of himself as a teacher first and foremost. He offers training through Glacier Air. He also instructs commercial pilots on how to teach flying.
“Flying is not that complicated if you are not taking stupid risks,” he said. “The way I see teaching flying, it is a people’s job. It is a communication thing… you explain things. To this day that is what keeps me going.”
Cam Ross is a Glacier Air flight instructor who was taught by Leh. “To learn from an instructor who has 30 years of experience instructing is something that is very rare in the industry anywhere in the world,” he said.
He said Leh’s calm demeanor is a strength.
“There’s an old saying about flight instruction and flying in general that it’s long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror, so to have that calm demeanor so you can be ready for that and still remain calm when things do happen… especially when students do things that are a little outside the normal envelope, it’s very important to have that calm, relaxed thing going on.”
In addition to years as a hang gliding and flight instructor, Leh has taught skiing and meditation.
While many of his peers have retired, Leh shows no sign of slowing down. The key, he said, is he loves what he does.
“In all my life in anything I have done, if it was just a job, I wouldn’t last very long. I don’t know if it is a community thing or what. It has to be outdoors, people, community – that is the underlying thing that makes me work.”
In all his years of flying, and in spite of 18 engine failures in ultra light planes, Leh said he has never been afraid in the air.
“I have had scares on a bicycle,” he said with a chuckle, “I have had more heart stoppers in a car – but in an airplane, never really.”
The key is never taking safety risks, he said. “I don’t want to live with the doubts in a plane. I have had all kinds of weather but never really a close call.”
Asked about his favourite plane, he winced slightly.
“I don’t have that,” he said. “I have no preference, it depends what I am doing on a given day.”
An airplane has to be light to defy gravity and is a compromise between complexity and cost, he said.
“So there are all kinds of designs based on the purpose of the plane. I like flying into unprepared strips where you are going to land on a runway that doesn’t really exist, but now it is your runway.”
