It will be another three years before Benny Syslo, a student pilot flying out of the Katama Airfield, solos for the first time. For most pilots in training, this would be just plain embarrassing – a record of delay suggesting quite strongly that they lacked the right stuff. But Benny began taking lessons two years ago, and by any measure, it’s clear that he’s an exceptionally good pilot. Yet the law says you can’t solo until you’re sixteen years old, no matter how sharp you are. Benny won’t turn sixteen until December of 2007. Given that school and the weather keep him from taking lessons in the winter, this means he won’t be able to go up alone until the spring or summer of 2008.

A general survey of Island aviation history suggests that no one has ever begun his formal, paid flight training at the age of eleven and carried it directly through to earning his private pilot’s license. Benny Syslo surely will – at about the same time he earns his driver’s license, or maybe even a little before. Meaning he’ll have to drive his folks to the field on a learner’s permit so he can fly them around in a plane.

It all started in 2003 with a father-son breakfast at the Dukes County Airport, where Benny loved to watch the planes take off and land. He’d been reading about planes all his life, and practicing on a rudimentary flight simulator program on his dad’s computer. Over breakfast, with Skyhawks and Mooneys and Cessna 402s taking off and landing just beyond the big windows, Benny’s father Mike, the senior marine fisheries biologist for the Vineyard, wondered aloud whether Benny ought to think about taking flying lessons. “Yeah, right,” Benny thought, but after breakfast, they walked over to the administration building to find out who taught people to fly on Martha’s Vineyard. Arthur Marx, a former instructor at the airport, suggested they try Paul Santopietro, a teacher at the Katama Airfield. “I could not believe it,” Benny wrote in School’s Out, an Island guide published by the seventh graders of the West Tisbury School. “When we walked in, it was a joke. When I walked out, I was going to fly!”

A few days later, Benny, a Chilmark lad, found himself at the grass airfield down-Island at Katama, waiting with his dad for Santopietro to return from a lesson in his two-seat Citabria. “I thought, ‘Okay, a little kid. We’ll just go out, we’ll do some basic instruction, but basically just fly around and have fun,’” Paul said in late August, as school loomed and Benny got ready to close out his third season of training. They took off that day, Benny in the forward seat, headset on, looking down on the Island for the first time in his life: “It was amazing. I had never seen Martha’s Vineyard from the air before. You could see all of the sandbars in the ocean and all of the little roads in Edgartown.” But then the weight of his responsibilities struck him: “I had about five seconds to look around,” he wrote in School’s Out, “because I had to get flying.”

“The second time we went up,” Paul said, “I thought, We’ll do some flight training, some actual maneuvers, and I started to explain something, and he piped up, ‘Oh, we’re going to do a stall.’ And I thought to myself, ‘This is going to be fun. He has some knowledge. We’re not going to just bumble along.’ I thought that was pretty telling about where we were headed.”

There was just one little problem that first year: Benny could not reach the pedals with his feet, so Paul had to turn the rudder while Benny banked the plane. But all that reading, simulator work, and eagerness was right there; Paul could see that the kid had the touch, and his powers of concentration were awesome. “He’s a quiet kid, very serious. You tell him something, and you can see by the way he looks at you that he’s taking it all in,” Paul said. In their lessons, student and teacher fly east over Chappaquiddick and practice maneuvers – climbs, descents, turns, and flying straight and level – about 2,000 feet above the channel between East Beach and Muskeget Island, just west of Nantucket.

“You have to make sure this thing is level with the white line to make sure you’re at level flight,” Benny said this summer, leaning through the door of the Citabria and pointing to the instrument panel. “We check all of these when we’re doing our preflight, to make sure we have oil pressure and everything. Then you watch your altimeter. The highest we go is about 4,000 feet. At a thousand feet, you have to be at 1,900 r.p.m. And then 2,400 r.p.m. when we’re doing our basic flying. And then when we’re doing a stall, bring back the throttle to idle, and just keep pulling back until you stall. Then you give full power.”

Each lesson costs $160 an hour. Benny will start working next season to help pay for them. After three lessons this summer, he was handling the radio and – because his feet reach the rudder pedals now – landing with no help from Paul. “The last lesson,” Benny recalled, “another airplane that was getting ready to take off saw me landing, and I think they said something like, ‘Nice landing,’ and I think you [Paul] said, ‘That was a thirteen-year-old.’ And they said, ‘Yeah, you’re going to make a good pilot.”

Benny, a patient lad, pondered the fact that it will be another three summers, almost, before he flies solo for the first time. He found the idea difficult to accept. But he already knows he wants to be a pilot for Cape Air – “I don’t want to do something like Southwest and their big jets, I don’t think. You’d probably get a lot of money, but I’d just rather stick around here” – and in the meantime, he has gently suggested to his father that he sell his lobster boat and buy a plane. Next door to the family home is Frank Fenner’s sheep farm, and Benny has long thought that this would make an excellent grass airfield.