Venezuela to Florida with Two Helicopters and a Dream (AFW Sep/Oct 2024, VerticalMag 27 Aug 2024)
by Liz Booker
This article was published in the September/October 2024 issue of Aviation for Women Magazine, and Vertical Magazine online on 27 August 2024.
Mother and son Ilse Medina and Gabriel Armas launched Rotor School training operations in Lake Wales, Florida on Dec. 5, 2023, importing two Robinson 22’s and a 25-year legacy of world-class helicopter training from Caracas, Venezuela. Their vision is to provide the same quality service in their new home while expanding their existing family of well-trained professional rotary wing pilots operating aircraft worldwide.
Ilse is an outgoing, engaging Latina with a calm, assuring confidence and a hint of the King’s English in her Spanish accent. Born in the U.S. to Venezuelan parents, she credits the British inflection to a childhood moving around internationally before settling back in their native country when she was 15. She was a young journalist working for the park service in Caracas in the early 1990’s where her reporting often intersected with helicopter operations, particularly search and rescue. She fell in love, both with Gabriel’s father, a search and rescue pilot, and the helicopter community. Through these connections, she met Francisco Pacheco, her future employer and business partner.
In 1992, Francisco and another pilot set a world record for longest over-water oceanic helicopter flight when they flew 33 hours across the Atlantic Ocean from Venezuela to Spain in a McDonell Douglas 500D. A visionary and entrepreneur, Francisco was inspired to start a helicopter training school, which he co-founded in 1996 with the help of Alejandro Mendoza who modeled their program after his own training in the U.S. Ilse enthusiastically joined the project as the school’s director, running the office and all operations. From his birth in 2001, her son Gabriel was immersed in this thriving aviation community.
When people ask Gabriel if he can remember his first helicopter flight, he confesses he can’t. “I’ve been in it all of my life.” He does, however, remember his first flight lesson. When the training center opened, Francisco invited his own flight instructor, Joel Rivas, to teach at the school. Joel became a grandfather figure to Gabriel and took Gabriel up for his first formal flight lesson on his tenth birthday.
Gabriel could easily pass for a Trevor Noah impersonator, in appearance and in the British-laced cadence of his speech. Talking with Ilse and Gabriel together reveals a very special connection filled with humorous banter and loving, loyal reverence that is bound not only by their mother-son relationship, but also by their survival under fire, both figuratively and literally.
After 20 years and nearly a thousand helicopter students, a constitutional crisis in 2017 led to protests and instability in Venezuela, severely impacting the training center’s operations and their family’s safety and security. Fuel scarcity and increasingly restrictive policies from the Venezuelan government all but shut down operations in 2017. “What I always tell people is that the country with the greatest oil reserves didn’t have any fuel, either for cars or for helicopters,” Gabriel explains. Flight restrictions were imposed, pilots had to request permission from the government to start their engines even for maintenance runs, and they were prohibited from training anywhere except the airport.
The restrictions on air operations were nothing compared to what they faced in their daily lives. After 120 days of protests, Ilse and 16-year-old Gabriel were standing on the balcony of their home in Caracas one night when a tank stopped short of a tripwire intended to blow it up on the street below. A motorcycle came along and tripped the wire, and shots flew everywhere. A bullet came through their kitchen just four feet away from where they were standing. The incident was a wakeup call to the dangers they faced if they stayed in Venezuela.
“On my birthday in July,” Ilse recalls, “we had no lights at home, because they shut down all the electricity. So, we’re sitting with the cake, singing, and I receive a text message from the U.S. Embassy.” It was an American Citizen Alert, advising U.S. citizens to depart the country. “So, I blow out the candles and I say to my family, I’m leaving. And they say, we are going with you.”
At this point, Gabriel had flown over 600 hours in a variety of rotary wing aircraft and had completed the requirements for his commercial instrument rating, which, in Venezuela, he would receive when he turned 18. In the U.S., he earned a B.A. in International Studies at Flagler College, worked as a hotel front desk supervisor, and finally landed a job at a flight school in Saint Augustine, getting him back into aviation after a six-year break.
When the pandemic hit, Francisco decided it was time to move the aircraft out of Venezuela and start fresh with a new school where they’d have the freedom and resources to continue operations. “Then began the fight with the Venezuelan authorities. Getting them out of the country was a Herculean effort,” says Ilse. With the support of co-founder Alejandro Mendoza, they navigated an oppressive bureaucracy that blocked them from de-registering the aircraft, demanding three-times their worth in taxes. The aircraft were inspected four or five times by the military before they were permitted to pack them in containers for shipment. After five years, they finally received the call that the helicopters were being loaded on a ship for transport.
They arrived at Port Everglades in March 2023, and it took seven months to translate all of the paperwork and rebuild the aircraft. Meanwhile, they had arranged to operate out of Winter Haven Regional Airport, but an aircraft incident at Winter Haven in March thwarted their plans. They were able to relocate and find a space in the FBO at Lake Wales Municipal Airport in time to begin flight training in December.
“Little by little, we are growing up again,” Ilse says. With the continuing support of Alejandro Mendoza, she is the President of Rotor School, Francisco is the Vice President, and Gabriel is the Director, teaching ground school as he works on his FAA Instructor rating. By summer 2024 they had already certified several rotary wing commercial pilots and partnered with Stratus Financial to offer financing to students. Their vision isn’t just to rebuild what they had in Venezuela, but to build upon that legacy.
“I want to build a school that is not only Part 141 certified but has a little bit of everything so we can have all kinds of people flying here, that we can give them quality training, and with a house that never stops providing them with love,” says Gabriel. “That was our trick in Venezuela. Our trick is we still call students to chat with them. And it’s family for us. They are our kids. I’m very proud of what my mom has done, what Francisco has done, and my grandpa [Joel Rivas] started. I love to carry that legacy and be able to form pilots that are true aviators and who can come back to us and consult us on anything. They represent us and they represent our legacy, too.”
