Staff photos by Corey Perrine Flight instructor Ashley Koons of Milford points out places to check on a Cessna with first-time instructee Jeremy Devlin of Manchester, Vt., on Wednesday at Nashua Airport.

Classrooms are stressful places on the first day of college. Classrooms as small as a closet and noisier than a garbage truck, balanced on air currents 1,000 feet above Lake Potanipo, go beyond stressful.

They’re terrific.

“I’ve dreamed of this since I was 5 years old,” Jeremy Devlin of Manchester, Vt., 18, said Thursday as he headed into his first pre-flight briefing at Daniel Webster College’s aviation center.

Devlin didn’t apply to any other school; his eyes were firmly set on the region’s the most unusual bachelor of science title, the flight operators degree.

Like lots of area college students, last week he started taking classes in psychology and writing and algebra – but unlike all of them except the 350 aviation majors at DWC, he’s also got to worry about learning to fly.

Although “worry” isn’t really the right word. “I can’t wait,” he said.

Daniel Webster College’s beginnings as an aviation school still dominate its role, even as it has expanded its academic offerings into traditional areas, as well as developing the untraditional niche of computer gaming. Its aviation program, combining flight training with a four-year undergraduate degree, is one of just a handful in the country, and the only one in this part of New England.

It has about 600 traditional students in the undergraduate program – plus about 600 more in night or graduate courses – of which slightly more than half are in aviation. According to Stephen Brown, director of flight operations, about 250 of those are looking to become pilots for airlines, private companies or the military; about 80 are in the air traffic control program; and a score or so are studying aviation management, which is like a business degree with emphasis on airports and fleet operations.

Aside from academic requirements, during their four years, these students must get a private pilot’s license for both visual flight and instrument-only flight, commercial licenses for single- and multi-engine planes, and most also get a flight instructor’s certificate.

That’s not cheap. The “fundamentals of flight” practicum, the first level of flight training, adds $9,150 to Daniel Webster College’s near-$17,000 tuition for resident students. More advanced flight training levels can add four times that much.

But visit the school’s Aviation Center next to the traffic control tower when a cloud of students are preparing to go up, and it’s obvious that the appeal of flying trumps thoughts of mere money.

“A lot of them had pilots in the family, or have logged some hours (at controls) themselves,” said instructor Ashley Koons of Milford. And then there are flight simulators, or sims, played on personal computers: “Some of these guys have learned stuff in sims you wouldn’t believe. I’ll ask them a random question and they’ll know it, and I’ll say, ‘Were you up studying your handbook last night?’ . . . but they learned it on a flight sim.”

For Devlin, Wednesday was the first day of flight instruction.

“After four or five flights, you’re on your own getting ready. I’m going to put my life in your hands,” Koons told him as they stood in a crowded room that afternoon, waiting to check aviation weather reports on the computer.

Koons keeps a watchful eye on instruments during Devlin’s first flying lesson. The 30-minute instruction started at Nashua Airport, headed west near Lake Potanipo and back.

Over the next two hours, culminating with a half-hour trip around the airport that allowed Devlinto make the first entry in his pilot’s log, the 22-year-old Koons gently besieged her pupil with information galore.

Pitot tubes, weight-and-balance measurements, wing-tank sumps, the “Daniel Webster 4” tie-down knot, fuel filter tests, Zulu time, elevators and flaps and rudders, wind direction, semi-comprehensible radio chatter – Koons went through all that and more, including such tidbits as making sure no birds have built a nest in the engine cowling.

It was like a busy lecture, with the difference that mistakes can be fatal – as she noted during the pre-flight inspection that makes sure the plane is ready to go aloft.

“If it’s smooth to the touch, it’s good to go,” Koons told Devlin, running her hand along the leading edge of the wing of Cessna No. 81, one of the 29 planes that DWC keeps at Nashua Airport. “If there’s any indentation it’s going to affect our airfoil, and we don’t want that. The wings are what keep the plane up.”

“I tell my students, the freshman year is the hardest year,” said Koons.

Koons is a Hershey, Pa., native who graduated from Daniel Webster and then was hired to work as one of several dozen flight instructors. She likes the school, and likes the fact that it pays benefits, which isn’t always the case when working for a private flight school.

Koons has almost 500 hours of piloting in her log book, and her eyes are on the captain’s chair in big jets. As a woman, Koons is something of a rarity among pilots, or among flight instructors, or among Daniel Webster aviation graduates. DWC says it usually has a roughly 80-20 gender split among its aviation majors, but Koons was one of just six females in her class, out of more than 80 students.

Koons has a full load of five students this semester, which means at least 10 hours of instruction, three days a week. “Sometimes it’s hard to find time to eat,” she said.

But just like the students, she says that practical matters pale in the face of the appeal of being a pilot.

“I looked at being an attendant. . . . But when I tried flying lessons, I knew that’s what I wanted,” she said.