Flying for Fun

If you’ve been to the Naples Pier recently to watch the sunset, you might have seen a little white plane fly overhead, with two or three passengers waving from the open cockpit. At the controls in the rear is Jon Fay, co-owner of Naples Air Inc.

Since acquiring the 1930s-style WACO biplane this past summer, Fay has added sight-seeing and sunset tours to the charter and air-ambulance services offered by the company at Naples Airport he owns with his wife, Catherine. For about $250 to $430, they offer half-hour or hour trips, and the popular sunset tours include a bottle of champagne.

"These planes are just so much fun," says Catherine Fay. The WACO holds two average-sized passengers who sit up front while Fay flies them up over the Naples coastline—south to Marco Island and the Ten Thousand Islands and north to Vanderbilt Beach, tipping the wings as they pass the crowds at the Naples Pier.

"It’s an open-cockpit biplane and it is aerobatic, although we don’t do aerobatics when we have people in it—or when I’m in it, because I get airsick," she says with a laugh. So it’s surprising that she joined her husband in the little plane for the trip from California to Florida last May when they got it.

Since buying the business nearly six years ago, Jon Fay has spent more time flying for business and less time flying for fun, says his wife, so when the opportunity came to buy the WACO, a replica of a 1930s-era barnstormer, he jumped at it. With help from a neighbor at the fly-in community where they live ("Everybody there has fun planes," she says), they found it in Oxnard, Calif., and boarded a one-way commercial flight.

They flew it back 2,300 miles at less than 100 miles per hour—"16 stops, 10 states, seven days and two barf bags," she says. They flew only about 1,000 feet above the ground in the open-air plane—from as low as sea level to as high as the Rocky Mountains.