When Cameron Park resident Bob Jerauld was growing up in the years following the Great Depression, the idea of one day owning and flying his own plane seemed an impossible fantasy. His family’s house was right under the flight path for McClelland Air Force Base, and he remembers fondly watching planes take off and land, all while assembling model planes and dreaming of one day sitting in the pilot’s seat.

While attending college, Jerauld swapped his mechanic skills for flying lessons, hoping to one day become an aerospace engineer, but the Korean War intervened, and he ended up enlisting in the U.S. Air Force. “I had a pilot’s license,” he explains. “I went in hoping to go to flight school…but they didn’t need pilots—they needed mechanics.” After four years as a flight mechanic in the military, Jerauld went on to a successful career in electronics design. Yet he continued to fly whenever he had the chance, and finally—in 1963—was able to purchase his first plane: a Piper PA-18 Super Cub.

Jerauld has been flying for over 50 years now, and for this amazing feat was recently granted the Wright Brothers Master Pilot Award from the Federal Aviation Administration. Even after all this time, Jerauld—a self-proclaimed “romantic flyer”—hasn’t lost his love of looking down on the world from the clouds. “Planes are like little magic carpets that take you to wonderful places,” he shares.

 — Amber Foster / Photos by Dante Fontana