SANTA ANA, Calif. -- Flying privately certainly has its perks.

Yorba Linda native Michael Holbrook can tell you this personally. He’s a professional flight technology major at Purdue and at 19 years old, he’s already a certified flight instructor. One day he hopes to be a commercial pilot.

Today, he’s taking a Cirrus SR22 to Van Nuys. He’s been flying smaller general aviation aircrafts at John Wayne Airport since he was in high school, but the ongoing debate over the General Aviation Improvement Program at the airport could impact the future of general aviation in Orange County.

“With the pilot shortage, I think if we don’t have a general aviation presence here in Southern California, especially at John Wayne Airport, such an influential airport in the area, if we don’t have that general aviation presence, it’s really going to hurt the community and the future pilots that want to be pilots,” said Holbrook.

His boss Michael Morgan owns Excel Air and leases hangar space at the airport. He’s seen first-hand how companies like JetSuiteX have crept in and taken over the airport’s general aviation real estate.

And it’s because of this gentrification of John Wayne Airport that some opponents of the improvement program are saying the program's three original proposals will, in their eyes, make things worse.

“All these hangars will be gone. The current plan takes 596 currently based aircraft and displaces 250 of them,” said Morgan.

That’s why he helped develop a fourth alternative; working with the SoCal Pilots Board and Airport Working Group to attempt to curb community concerns like noise pollution, while maintaining the space for general aircraft and acknowledging that the airport, built in 1963, is in need of some upgrades.

The Orange County Board of Supervisors has delayed a decision on which alternative proposal it will pick. Holbrook hopes that if expansion is approved, the decision will still leave room for the little guys, in his case a little guy with big dreams.

“It’s a pretty big deal because without general aviation, you cannot have the corporate or the commercial aviation which is so influential in the community and just everybody as a whole,” said Holbrook.

CORRECTION: A previous version of this story and video report referred to JetSuiteX as a flight-based operator. The error has been corrected in the article, and the video has been removed. (August 11, 2020)