Scott Risan joined the company in January, 1998. These days, he’s here early every morning, usually commuting in from his airpark home in his RV-4. 

Scott has now logged about 4000 hours…but his first solo was probably a little different than yours. Sure, there was the same nervous excitement when you realized that you really were on your own. But you weren’t on a dirt road in Nebraska, looking over the nose of an elderly Stinson, 200 miles away from home. And it wasn’t your dad telling you to fly the thing back to Colorado. And you were probably more than fourteen years old.

"My dad was an Air Force pilot when I was born on Okinawa," says Scott, "and after that he had a full career with United. He and my grandfather, shared a Stinson 108-2. I’d been flying with him since I was very young, and I had a decent handle on how everything worked in an airplane, even if I was too young to fly by myself. One day he wanted me to go with him to some farm in Nebraska to look at a dump truck. I was kind of excited…not about flying the Stinson. I’d done plenty of that. I thought I was going to get to drive the dump truck home…now, that seemed really cool!"

They found the farm and landed on a dirt road next to the fence line. Scott’s father kicked the tires on the old dump truck and made the deal. Then Scott got his big surprise: Dad was driving the dump truck. Scott was flying the Stinson.

"It really wasn’t that big a deal…although I was scared to death at the time. I could fly the airplane well enough, the weather was fine, and navigation was really simple. Just fly west until I hit the Front Range and turn right. I knew all the landmarks and didn’t have any trouble finding Loveland."

Scott kept flying, making his first official solo on his sixteenth birthday and getting his license a year or so later. In 1984, at the age of twenty-two, Scott received his A&P from the Spartan School of Aeronautics in Tulsa, OK. In the fall of the same year, he entered the University of Idaho, studying zoology and intending to become a veterinarian. Hoping to land a summer job "wrenching" on ag planes, he called an acquaintance in North Dakota. "I don’t need a mechanic," was the answer. "But I sure could use a pilot…" With the ink still wet on his commercial ticket, Scott went to work flying Pawnees back and forth, back and forth, across the fields of North Dakota.

"I had all of 250 hours total time and I’d never flown a single seat airplane," Scott remembers. "I was very tense most of the first season. My confidence level increased slowly and I grew to love the flying." He eventually accumulated over three thousand hours of ag flying. Along the way he survived bird strikes, barb wire fences and other impediments to flight. It’s not everyone who comes home with a gopher wrapped around a lift strut!

"I surprised a hawk who was just lifting off with lunch. He jettisoned the gopher to avoid me and the poor thing ended up stuck to my strut. The guys at the strip were really impressed with my low flying ability. Me, I felt for that gopher…it’s pretty unlucky when a hawk drops you and you get nailed by an airplane before you can reach the ground!"

In 1988, Scott graduated from the University of Idaho with a BS in zoology and the phone number of his wife-to-be, Cynthia. The phone number proved to be the more useful. Scott and Cynthia spent 1989 and 1990 in Washington, DC, where Cynthia had a job with a consulting firm and Scott actually did use his zoology degree briefly, working for a biotech company. Nineteen ninety one found them back on the West Coast, managing the FBO in Astoria, Oregon, at the mouth of the Columbia River. He and Cynthia lived in the old wood frame building over the office, which rocked and swayed in the wind as the winter storms pounded in off the Pacific. The salary wasn’t the greatest, but there were a few perks…the rent was free, and as a bonus for putting up with the low pay and living conditions, Scott’s employer bought him a complete RV-4 kit.

The FBO job lasted four years and then collapsed. Even though he had acquired an IA to go with his A&P, there just wasn’t enough aviation work around Astoria to keep Scott employed. He took a job in an electric shop in town, rebuilding alternators and other electrical components used in log trucks, fishing vessels and automobiles. "I learned all about getting really dirty," he says. Between the RV-4 project and some freelance IA work, he managed to maintain his ties to aviation.

The RV-4 proceeded slowly…so slowly that on Labor Day, 1996, he made a bet with his wife: If he didn’t have the airplane done by Labor Day, 1997, Cynthia got to choose the paint scheme. Visions of having to explain a bright pink airplane every time he landed helped spur him along. Even so, it was April of 1998 before the airplane was ready for paint, and, in what can only be described as true love, Cynthia let him off the hook. When their RV-4 flew in June, it sported an attractive white and maroon paint scheme.

"I get a kick out using my RV to get work at Van’s," says Scott. "It really seems appropriate. Some of the early morning flights are just beautiful, with the Cascade mountains outlined against the eastern sky. When you can see that, and enjoy your job, too, you’ve got to feel a little lucky."