Al Stuber, of Lawrence, photographed with his airplane at the Lawrence Municipal Airport on Wednesday. Stuber is one of the pilots who fly over Kansas University football games and Kansas City Royals postseason contests.

Al Stuber, of Lawrence, photographed with his airplane at the Lawrence Municipal Airport on Wednesday. Stuber is one of the pilots who fly over Kansas University football games and Kansas City Royals postseason contests.

If the Royals keep winning this postseason, Al Stuber, a retired Lawrence property manager, just might fly over his first World Series game.

The pilot, a member of the aviation formation team KC Flight, has been cruising his single-engine plane above Kansas University football games, NASCAR races and Royals contests for years, but the World Series just might be his crowning achievement. Well, other than if he gets to fly over a Jayhawks win over Iowa State next month, the KU diehard joked.

Stuber, 69, started piloting in 1966. (“No, I didn’t know Orville and Wilbur,” he kids). Twenty-two years later, he did his first flyover — why else? — to impress a girl, a fellow KU grad student.

“That was a situation where the Jayhawks had just won the national championship. They were having a big pep rally at Memorial Stadium. Danny Manning, the whole team was there,” Stuber, who holds a PhD in engineering from KU, said on a recent day at the Lawrence Municipal Airport hangar where he keeps his planes. “I’m also an instructor pilot, so I had some student pilots who put ‘KU No. 1’ on top of the wings. So when we flew over, it was alleged that I rolled it upside down so the kids could see it. The FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) did not like that. They took away my license for 90 days.”

He also ran into trouble a few years back when he was asked to skywrite “KSU” over a Kansas State football game in Manhattan. “On the way out, I discovered they were playing the Jayhawks that day. So we put a big ‘K’ and a big ‘U’ in the sky. But before we could do the ‘S,’ we ran out of smoke oil,” he said, not breaking character, to the point that it becomes difficult to tell fable from reality. “They called Homeland Security and reported us. Homeland Security called me and said I was prohibited from coming to Snyder Stadium. I said, ‘What was your complaint?’ They said, ‘Sky graffiti.'”

He was eventually invited back. During his latest flyover in Manhattan, last month, Stuber repented by covering up the Jayhawk logo on the side of his plane with the letters “KSU.” That day, the crowd was so loud Stuber couldn’t hear his ground commander through the cockpit radio. So the pilot took out his cell phone and gave the guy a call. “You talk about texting while driving …,” joked Stuber, whose accent sounds a bit like former President George W. Bush.

Before Game 3 of the AL championship series this Monday, as they did for the wild-card game and clincher of the division series, Stuber and his fellow pilots will meet at an airport not far from Kauffman Stadium, move into a holding pattern nearby and, once they get the word from their ground controller, head toward the ballpark, in formation, at 180 miles an hour, igniting canisters of colored smoke attached to their wings. They have to time it all just right, so they fly over during the lines “… and the home of the brave.”

“The only time we get tangled is if some idiot tries to redo ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ and stretches it out, or maybe the Baptist preacher goes a little bit long in whatever it is he’s saying,” said Stuber, who uses the same call sign, “Shooter,” that he did when he served in the Navy.

On the way back to the stadium, the pilots fly the team over the homes of relatives who live in Kansas City. Stuber similarly tried to give a private show to the Free State High School football team last month.

“We were coming back from the K-State game, and I thought Free State was practicing that night,” he said. “We were coming down I-70 and we took a diversion. We went over Free State, lit up the smoke. I saw a bunch of people over there toward that Six Mile club out in the parking lot, waving like crazy, but there wasn’t anybody in the stadium. So they got a freebee.”

KC Flight doesn’t get money to do the flyovers, though the pilots are usually rewarded with a complimentary pair of tickets to the game. “That makes me real popular,” Stuber said. “I’ll have a friend call: ‘Hey, Al, this is Fred. I know I haven’t called you for 20 years, but are you going to that Royals game?'”

Stuber admits that while he still gets nervous in the air all these years later, flying in formation has become almost routine. “It’s kind of like Bill Self coaching his team,” he noted. “We have a flight leader and he says, ‘Here’s what you do, you go there …’ Pretty soon it becomes a standard kind of procedure.”

However, flying over Monday’s Royals game, the first time the team will host an ALCS game in nearly 30 years, will be anything but standard.