Sky’s the Limit

Written by Malena Saadeh

Captured by Isaac Wasserman

In the cockpit of his Cessna 172, Steve Boulton glances down at the notepad strapped to his knee and runs through his pre-flight checklist. “Check, check — hm — check,” Boulton mouths. He then sticks his head out of the hatch to let out a hearty “CLEAR PROP.” As the propeller gets spinning, a smile washes over his face. He’s on his way up. 

Even as he nears 70 and with around 1,000 airtime hours behind him, Boulton is still as excited as a shaken bottle of bubbly when he hears those three magic words from the tower: Clear for takeoff. 

“I had an uncle down in northern California. I must’ve been about four when he’d take me on the back of his bi- cycle over to the airport and we’d lay in the grass and watch the planes,” Boulton recalls. It’s a chilly February morning and Boulton is speaking from his hangar on the north side of the Eugene Airport. “That’s when I fell in love with the idea of flying.”

Boulton’s plan from then on was to become a carrier pilot for the Navy. Unfortunately, bad eyesight shut that door for him by his early teens. He assumed that his dream of flying was over, so for years Boulton followed the family trade and worked as a minister. It wasn’t until he was 45 that he once again turned his focus toward the sky. Circumstances landed Bolton back in Eugene and he received his private pilot’s license in July 1996. Lat- er, he became a certified flight instructor, moving up the ladder at warp speed. Getting in the air was all it took for Boulton to truly find himself in his element. 

“If you have a dream you are really passionate about and you really want to achieve it, go after it with every- thing you got,” Boulton says. He pauses and gives a wise look from behind his aviator sunglasses. “Somehow,” he says, “it’s all gonna work out.”