"C J Campbell" wrote in message ...
Kids usually love to fly. It is their parents that cause all the trouble. I
also would go with putting the 3 year old in back with a parent and the five
year old in front. Do not let the 5 year old have the yoke, no matter how
tempting it seems. A 5 year old will like as not nose the thing over saying,
"I'm gonna crash this thing!" They are old enough to know the plane could
crash, but too young to understand that this might be a bad thing.

FWIW, we let my daughter handle the yoke starting at age 3 1/2.
She was warned not to touch anything without explicit permission,
to stop touching immediately when told, and that if she had
any trouble remembering that or following instructions Daddy
would pull her into the back seat poco pronto. So far she's
been very good.

She doesn't nose the plane over, but she does have a hard time
flying level. We must present what a friend calls a "walrus"
track on the radar ("Wandering Aimlessly Lost over Rural US").

Of course, that's not to say there aren't 5 yr olds who
might behave as you say, and adults who would be incapable
of controlling them. I've met 5 yr olds I don't want w/in
100 ft of my plane.

Frankly, if I have doubts about the behavior of any of my prospective
front-seat pax I don't go. I have confidence in my ability to
undo or overpower a 5 yr old, but I've un-invited a couple of
large adult males when I got the sense that they thought they
knew more about flying than they did, and that they might not
be willing to accept me as pilot-in-command and the ultimate
arbiter of 'what goes' on the flight.

Cheers,
Sydney