Kemper Aviation, a now-defunct flight school in Lantana, FL, was once clogged with over 100 young students. Some showed a lack of selfcontrol extending from their youthfully turbulent private lives on the ground upward to the skies of South Florida. Youngsters may think they are invulnerable. Most had yet to learn that invulnerability is a hazardous attitude at any age.
The school was infamous for its poor maintenance. There were so many emergency landings they became sarcastically known as the “Kemper One Arrival.” Kemper’s most senior instructor counseled younger CFI’s, “The only thing we can do is check to the extent that we can check and fly the airplanes.” Four months later, he and a student died when
their Piper Archer crashed at night due
to a loosely affixed fuel strainer bowl, invisible
from the outside, that starved the
engine of fuel.
