The story behind a donation to GCU that is more than its parts

GCU CityServe Director Nathan Cooper (left) and Tony Anger, CEO and president of Grounded No More Veterans Flight Lift, pose with an engine from the group’s 1943 WW II-era Fairchild PT-26 trainer that will be a showpiece outside Lux Precision Manufacturing on GCU's campus.

It doesn’t look like much, a big engine sitting just outside Nathan Cooper’s office in Building 66 on Grand Canyon University’s 27th Avenue campus. But once Cooper and Tony Anger, the man who donated it to GCU, start to weave the engine’s tale, it’s more than meets the eye.

The 1943 engine came off a Fairfield PT-26 training plane, the first model that a World War II pilot would get into to train for the war. The powerful straight-six cylinders center an unusually made engine that could run upside down so the pilot could see over it – and the propellors wouldn’t hit the ground.

This is how it came to sit at GCU, destined to be on display for building tours outside of Lux Precision Manufacturing, the alumni-founded company that is making parts for more modern aerospace models while training Center for Workforce Development participants.

Cooper, the director of GCU CityServe next to Lux, always wanted to be a pilot. He took aviation classes in high school and set out to get his private license, though his Subway wages weren’t enough to finish. He came to GCU as a student and stayed after graduation to run CityServe, which supplies goods and services to people in need.

But he never forgot his love of aviation, his office lined with World War II books, memorabilia and photos of his favorite planes, such as P-51 fighter bomber with pieces of an actual plane inside the frame. His grandfather fought in Vietnam, and his dad was career Air Force before returning to farming and pastor work in Minnesota. So when Cooper heard about an air show in Buckeye, Arizona, he had to check it out.

He met Anger, who was giving free flights to military veterans in his PT-26, powered by that very engine, and asked Anger if he could volunteer. Soon he was volunteering nearly every weekend, and Anger took him up in the plane. He learned that the retired commercial pilot had even more fondness for flying. Anger went up on a flight with his dad when he was 15, the prop broke off and they crash-landed in a parking lot.

“Being 15, I couldn’t wait to get to school to tell my friends I had been in an airplane crash. I thought it was the coolest thing ever,” said Anger of his survival. “Two weeks later, I soloed on my 16th birthday.”

Zoom ahead to his days as an American Airlines pilot, a veteran of air shows for 16 years, who 10 years ago became the new owner of a plane that had helped British pilots train in Canada during World War II because it was too dangerous to fly in war-torn England.

“I bought it for fun,” he said, before one day overhearing an Iraq War veteran, who was at the airstrip to buy his veteran grandfather a flight on a World War II plane. “He thought it was $43.50, but when he got up there and found out it was $435, he about passed out,” Anger said. “I asked him, ‘Hey, you want to take a ride in an airplane that your grandfather would have trained in?' He said how much is that? I said nothing.”

An engine from a 1943 WWII-era Fairchild PT-26 was donated to GCU.

That’s how Grounded No More Veterans Flight Lift started nine years ago, its mission to take veterans up on a flight in an historic warplane.

They come to Falcon Field in Mesa, Arizona, with friends and family, welcomed by a procession of flags, and tell about their military service before taking a flight, which may or may not include a little roller-coaster-type ride.

“A lot who have been in combat don’t want to talk,” said Anger, the organizations CEO and president. “But what we noticed, after they go up for a flight, they start jabbering like crazy. I had one guy, I keep the letter on my phone, he was ready to take his own life until he said he had no idea people cared that much for veterans. It totally changed his life.”

And Cooper’s father and grandfather soon became two of the 690 veterans so far to be honored with a flight.

“My grandfather is a Vietnam vet who has an amazing story – a combat medic in '65, and he was there nine months when the average lifespan of a medic was in days,” said Cooper, who described an ambush when his grandfather was among three out of 40 soldiers to survive, but with several wounds.

“We were able to give my grandfather a flight in December of 2023. My grandfather has a lot of PTSD and Parkinson’s, and after that flight he started opening up about his service," Cooper said. "That was the most I ever heard my grandfather talk about it. Now he talks about it all the time. It almost rewired him.”

Nathan Cooper, director of GCU CityServe, in the warehouse of Building 66.

In his volunteering, Cooper saw the same with other older men gingerly boarding a plane, but once inside, they're taken back to a pivotal moment in their lives, suddenly naming off all the instruments in the plane.

The original Fairchild engine blew out a cylinder – luckily they made it back to land, one of many Anger stories – and the plane sat there until Cooper had an idea. He asked Anger to donate it to GCU.

The plane was eventually sold, but he donated the motor in June, Anger said, because he always loved GCU's Christian mission – and a certain volunteer who has become like one of his family. It eventually will be accompanied by information about the engine, the plane and its role in helping train pilots for war.

“It will really showcase what manufacturing was back in the '40s and the progression of it,” said Cooper of the advanced Computer Numerical Control manufacturing taking place at Lux for aerospace parts, among other industries.

“This engine has a rich history of training for World War II, but also for flights for 400 veterans, which is as big a part of the story and why we wanted to honor it,” Cooper said.

He recalls taking an older man to board the plane, thinking “how lucky am I to be able to sit next to this guy from World War II that flew in this aircraft?"

“It is one of my favorite visions, getting out of the cockpit and seeing that guy with his hat and headset on and ready to go. He ended up flying for some of the time. He took the stick again.”

Grand Canyon University senior writer Mike Kilen can be reached at mike.kilen@gcu.edu

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