Alone, with a few weeks’ worth of clothes and food packed into his 1991 Nissan Maxima, 16-year-old Nathan Cooper made the two-day drive from Nevada to Montana to enroll in flying lessons out of the local airport on the weekends. At the time, learning to fly was a passion he grew up with, but it hadn't yet dawned on him that this trip would end up being his start down the road of a family tradition.