It’s partly cloudy with low wind speeds at Kansas City’s Charles B. Wheeler downtown airport on a recent Friday evening. Private jets and single-engine planes are rapidly roaring on and off the runway.
In one of the small hangars, 21-year-old Davion Stokes, 6 feet tall in a bright red Chiefs T-shirt and a huge afro, holds a tow bar attached to a red Piper Archer airplane.
He hops in the pilot seat, goes over a checklist, and fires up the engine. A single propeller starts to spin.
While operating a plane makes some flyers tense, it relaxes Stokes.
“I don’t think I could see myself doing anything else than this,” said Stokes. “It’s another form of therapy. I could just come out here and fly and just look at the view, see all the sights to see, see people on the ground, see cars on the ground go by me.”
But perfecting his flying skill isn’t the only reason Stokes has committed so much of his time and money to building this career in aviation. He’s concerned about the lack of Black pilots.
Through the Red Tail Academy, a flight school started in 2020, he’s part of a team working to increase the disproportionately few Black pilots and aviation engineers. He wants to share the satisfaction he’s found with other young people in the Black community.
Childhood dream
Stokes has loved planes since he was a child, a passion he inherited from his grandfather, who would take him to airshows at this very same airport. “It just kind of planted a seed in me,” he said. “It was cool to get into.”
Stokes has been studying to become a pilot since he was a teenager. He piloted his first flight at the tender age of 19. The next year, he flew 1,500 miles from Los Angeles to Kansas City.
Today, he has a private pilot’s license, a commercial pilot’s license, an instrument rating and a commercial multi-engine certification, which allows him to fly a double-engine plane.
In his brief career, Stokes has traveled to over 30 airports. At each one, he noticed something odd. He didn’t see many Black pilots.
“I would say just about none,” he said. “One of my instructors was actually Black, but besides that, like, it’s hard to come around to seeing somebody who looks like me. It’s very, very rare, very rare.”
According to the 2024 economic database, Data USA, approximately 2.76% of aircraft pilots and flight engineers were Black. The vast majority — 84% — were white.
Preserving a legacy
Red Tail Academy gets its name from the 332nd Fighter Pilot Group, better known as the Tuskegee Airmen. The Red Tails were an all-African American Air Corps Combat Unit known for their rate of success and effectiveness during World War II. The unit flew a total of 1,578 missions with the lowest loss record of any fighter escort group.
The flight school launched six years ago to educate underrepresented youth about all aspects of the aviation industry. Every year, they host summer camps for kids aged 12-19 and take on students during the rest of the year who want to further pursue their training. The students get hands-on practice through the school’s three flight simulators and five planes.
Standing in front of an open hangar with a blue Cirrus SR 22 is Patrick Nelson, 62, executive director of Red Tail Academy. He was formerly with community outreach for the Aviation Institute of Maintenance.
Nelson said in most Black households, the idea of becoming a pilot isn’t considered.
“We don’t talk about becoming aviation or aviators at the dinner table,” he said. “It’s just not something that’s common in our culture. We’ll talk about doctors, we’ll talk about lawyers, we’ll talk about hopefully getting a sports-type deal, but we never talk about (aviation).”
Red Tail Academy visits schools during career fairs to let youth know about the rich history and possibilities for them in the aviation industry. In 2024, Nelson said they visited 75 schools. One of the goals he often hears from families, Nelson said, is to provide kids with a lucrative career in an effort to create generational wealth.
“There are pilots making over $1 million a year flying 15 days a month,” Nelson said. “As an inner-city kid, we don’t see that type of money. The average salary for a pilot is $200,000. If you put $200,000 as an annual salary in your household, it’s going to change the family financial dynamic of your household.”
Though the career can be highly profitable, the training and education are pricey. According to the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, getting your private pilot certificate can cost up to $20,000.
Nelson said that the cost through Red Tail Academy is around $12,000 but some students who join the program don’t complete it for a variety of reasons. The reasons range from scheduling conflicts to a lack of transportation, along with other barriers. Some of the students have summer jobs with no way to get from home to jobs to the program downtown.
“(One girl) didn’t have fuel to get down to the airport,” Nelson said. “The family was not bringing her down here. We figured out she had obstacles, so we try to remove the barriers.”
Red Tail Academy
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Red Tail Academy
Red Tail subsidizes some of the cost for students through private fundraising and events. Depending on a student’s need, they also get support from Red Tail’s parent nonprofit, Aspire Aviation Academy. For instance, students might get a gas card, given the price to fill up their plane has risen to roughly $7 a gallon in recent months.
Nelson said he’d like to see more of their students complete the program and get their pilot’s license. Currently, 40% end up with a private license. Nelson would like to bump that up to at least half.
A commercial license requires even more rigorous training and flight time. Families, Nelson said, are often less than supportive.
“If they don’t have the family support, it makes it harder,” he said. “Because aviation has not been an industry populated by many Black people, families can be skeptical. A family will tell (a student) you’re wasting your time, you’re wasting your money, because they can’t see the vision.”
Growing interest
Despite the low percentage of African American pilots, exposure to the industry has grown in recent years. The Organization of Black Aerospace Professionals is a national nonprofit dedicated to the advancement of minorities in aviation. Nearly 90% of its members are pilots, while others are in fields such as air traffic control, dispatch and engineering.
Albert Glenn sits on OBAP’s advisory board. He’s a retired pilot for FedEx and said that despite the cost of getting a pilot’s license, there are many positions opening up in the field.
“When you think about baby boomers and how large that group was, and how many of them are retiring?” Glenn said. “There’s a lot of replacements.”
Glenn said initiatives like Red Tail Academy that are nurturing young, Black pilots are helping fill the gap with minority professionals. But efforts by the administration of Donald Trump to dismantle Diversity, Equity and Inclusion offices and contracts have caused funding to pull back for such programs.
In February 2026, U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said that the Federal Aviation Administration would encourage more merit-based hiring. The announcement came in the wake of President Trump’s unfounded suggestion on Truth Social that diversity hires by the Biden administration were somehow related to the in-air collision between an American Airlines plane and an Army helicopter in January 2025.
“It does have a good storyline to talk about it for some,” Glenn said, “but the reality is, if you’re qualified and you have a job, you’re going to get an opportunity.”
Back at the downtown airport, Stokes is finishing his checklist by turning the engine and front propeller on and off again. He knows he could get a pretty good job with his current qualifications.
But his long-term career goal is to work with the next generation of Black pilots who can fill his shoes, and to convince them there is a community of Black aviators they can turn to for support.
“Right now I’m getting my flight instructor certificate, so I’ll be able to eventually teach people to fly,” Stokes said. “Community is very important, especially a community that looks like you.”
