Reaching for the Sky

When the owner of a pilot school in Naples proposed that Carsten Sturm buy the school from him, Sturm’s response was unequivocal: "I’m not stupid." Now, he says, you can interpret that however you want, because he did end up buying the school—on Sept. 1, 2001.

"Eleven days later, the world had changed," says Sturm, sitting in the second-floor office of Europe-American Aviation, overlooking the Naples Municipal Airport terminal.

A former German pilot, Sturm had trained at a NATO base in Texas. After leaving the air force and working in corporate positions that took him away from his love of flying, he decided, "I’ll go to the U.S. and do as much flying as I like." Within a couple of years, he and his girlfriend (now wife and operations manager Bettina Scherf) moved to Naples, bought the school, and promptly found themselves in a crisis.

After the terrorist attacks, flight training in the United States was completely shut down, and for months afterward, chaos ruled, says Sturm. "We were closed for about two weeks, and then we could start with certain aspects of training," he says. Contradictory rules and miscommunication were rampant as officials tried to establish new rules in the new climate of heightened security.

When Sturm bought the business, about 80 percent of the students were foreign and 20 percent from the United States. "In 2002, it didn’t seem so badly affected," he says. "By 2003, you could feel a lot more side effects, because then there were rumors that foreigners could not train at all."

Foreign students were not prohibited, but requirements were tightened—requiring fingerprinting and more extensive background checks, for example—and it was difficult to get correct information, and to get the word out to prospective customers.