Detroit teen completes first solo flight at Davis Aerospace in 11 years

Herbert Anderson was 18 years old when he became the first Davis Aerospace Technical High School student in more than a decade to complete a solo flight. The incoming senior reaches that milestone as the school prepares to return to Coleman A. Young International Airport, the home it lost in 2013, an absence that effectively grounded the program's most visible symbol of student achievement.

The last solo flight logged at Davis Aerospace was in 2015. Anderson's flight, completed this year, closes an 11-year gap in a program that was built around giving Detroit teenagers real access to the sky.

He has also passed the written portion of his private pilot exam. Anderson has said he wants to attend the U.S. Naval Academy or Tuskegee University after graduation and eventually fly fighter jets for the Navy. He shared his experience publicly at a Detroit Public Schools Community District event earlier this year, where district officials were marking the school's planned return to City Airport.

Davis Aerospace traces its roots to 1954, when it was founded as Aero Mechanics High School. The program moved to Coleman A. Young International Airport in 1986 and built a reputation as one of the few programs in any urban public school district offering students hands-on access to real aviation training. In 2013, an emergency manager relocated the school to the Golightly Career and Technical Center in the Jefferson-Chalmers neighborhood on the east side, cutting students off from direct runway access. The solo flight program fell dormant. The last student to fly solo completed the milestone in 2015.

The school is coming back. Davis Aerospace is on track to return to City Airport in fall 2026, following a renovation of the airport's 53,000-square-foot terminal funded through Detroit Public Schools Community District and a state appropriation. The move will allow the school to more than double its enrollment to as many as 200 students and restore the kind of flight access that defined the program in its early years.

The current curriculum at the Golightly campus already covers aviation fundamentals. Students work with flight simulators and can pursue their remote pilot's certificate through the career and technical education program. But the solo flight, the moment a student takes a plane up alone for the first time, requires a different kind of access. That access was what Anderson found his way back to.

The return to City Airport carries practical weight beyond the symbolic. Being on an active airfield means flight training can be woven into the regular school day rather than treated as a special occasion. Students can observe and participate in actual aviation operations, and for those who complete the program, proximity to a working runway changes what a high school career looks like.

Anderson's trajectory from a Detroit east side classroom to discussions of service academies and fighter jets reflects what Davis Aerospace was designed to produce: a path into aviation and aerospace for students who might not have found one any other way. His solo flight, the first in 11 years, suggests that path is open again.