Putnam City senior earns his wings
For Zhamarius Harmon, the most exciting place in the world is in the air.
The 17-year-old senior at Putnam City High School is a licensed pilot and spent his summer training in an Air Force program.
He hasn't flown in weeks since he came back to school, but he still dreams of being in the sky.
“Knowing you're in the air, sometimes 500 feet above the ground, it's just something that's in comparable to anything,” Harmon said. “You can see everything. You're flying around clouds, and everything is awesome. It's just a beautiful sight. I love it.”
Yet, Harmon knows he almost didn't make it back from pilot training at all. A plane malfunction turned a
solo flight into a near-death experience.
With a changed perspective, he returned for his senior year at Putnam City, where he participates in JROTC, runs track and plays cornerback for the football team.
“It' s always running through my mind I couldn't be here today,” he said.
`Stay focused'
Harmon was one of three JROTC cadets in Oklahoma selected for the Air Force Chief of Staff Flight Academy Scholarship Program, a lengthy name for high school pilot training.
The Air Force set out two years ago to solve a critical pilot shortage. It invested millions
in the new program to train teenagers to fly, starting them on a course toward careers in aviation.
High school students from across the country participated in summer training and earned their private pilot license at the end of the program.
Harmon knew he wanted to apply. He had been fascinated with aviation since he saw a Blue Angels flight when he was little.
Harmon grew up near an airport in Mississippi and would point out the airplanes in the sky, his mother, Tawana Hobbs, said. A member of a military family, Harmon visited the Mississippi Air Force Base where his grandmother worked and got to sit in an airplane.
“It was life-changing for him. He talked about it for days,” Hobbs said. “I always stayed on him, `Stay focused. Whenever you have something that you want to do, you research that and find out what it takes to become that. You don't let anyone tell you what you are and can be and want to be.'”
Her son took the lesson to heart. He studied books on aviation. At Putnam City, he joined JROTC and practiced in the flight simulator over and over again.
When he tested for the Air Force program, he was ready.
“I've always been interested in aviation, so I brought home books. I was reading; I was just studying. It was my love,” Harmon said. “Taking that test was one of the easiest things ever.”
He breezed through qualifying exams that tested his aviation knowledge and decision- making. He passed a physical training test and the program's academic requirements — a mandatory minimum of a 3.0 GPA.
He shipped out to Lakeland, Florida, for pilot training starting June 2. He lived at Southeastern University and flew at the local airport.
Harmon had flown a few times before leaving for Florida, once with the Young Eagles aviation education program and another time with the Civil Air Patrol, a civilian arm of the Air Force.
In pilot training, he learned to fly a single-engine Tecnam P2008. He practiced stalls, steep turns and touch-and-go maneuvers with an instructor.
Later in the program, his instructor gave him permission to take a plane out for a solo flight. Harmon, with 10 hours of flight experience, had a free hour to practice 10 touch-andgo patterns.
He conducted his usual preflight checks. Everything was clear.
He taxied his plane to the runway and took off.
`Survival mode'
It didn't take long for Harmon to realize something went wrong.
Only 150 feet off the ground, his engine started to sputter. He had just put up the flaps on his wings, which configured them for a higher speed. This correct procedure suddenly became dangerous in a malfunctioning aircraft.
The plane started losing speed and lift. His propeller, normally whirring at 5,500 rotations per minute, dropped down to only 2,600 rpm.
“I'm like, `If I don't pull out of it, my plane's going to stall on me and fall to the ground,'” Harmon recalled. “There were roads and trees and houses in front of me. The (Federal Aviation Administration) rulebook says if you're lower than 500 feet, keep going straight and find somewhere to land. If had kept going straight, I would have crashed into houses or trees.”
Harmon made the split-second decision to turn his plane around and glide back toward the runway, a move known as a teardrop.
He cleared the maneuver with air traffic control and headed back toward the airport. Turning back toward the runway from which you came is comparable to pulling into oncoming traffic, he said.
Not every novice pilot has the wherewithal to pull off a teardrop move, Putnam City JROTC Col. Dane Christensen said.
“At 150 feet at the speed he was traveling, that's probably five seconds, not even that. Four seconds, it's that fast to make the decisions,” Christensen said. “A lot of kids will panic. … They pull the nose back, and next thing they know the plane's falling. Then you have the Channel 9 News, fireball in the ground. He didn't do that. It's amazing.”
Maintenance staff examined the plane once Harmon landed. They later learned a pin came loose and stuck in a carburetor. Instead of running on two carburetors, the plane was functioning with one.
“Survival mode came into effect,” Harmon said. “I do remember I was feeling scared. I was praying. I was like, `Man, I hope I don't die.'”
After he landed, he called his instructor and then his mom. It took him a week to bounce back and feel comfortable in a cockpit again.
He had once felt untouchable in the air, like he was on top of the world. Now, he knows how a situation could change in an instant.
“(Zhamarius) and I had just talked about a female pilot in Mississippi that crashed,” Hobbs said. “The very next day he called me and told me about an incident that could have been tragic. It was a heart-stopping moment, but also it made me realize that your son had the ability to stop the tragedy.”
The experience didn't deter Harmon from aviation. He said he hopes to fly for the Air Force someday. If that's not an option, he'll fly commercial aircraft.
“I felt cocky, you know, like this is not going to happen to me, and then it did happen,” he said of the incident. “So, I was like, `Man, you've got to be careful Z.' The world is crazy, and anything can happen at any moment.”
Every pilot earns a call sign, a nickname that describes the pilot's personality or an experience. Think of Maverick from “Top Gun.”
Harmon earned his call sign this summer. When he's in the sky, he's known as “Teardrop.”