Fly girls: local high school students pursue aviation passions

ANTIGO -- The last time Sydney Swartz and Marli Novy saw each other, they were part of the same girl scout troop.

Then Swartz quit the scouts, and Novy attended the Wittenberg-Birnamwood School District. Their reconnecting in any meaningful way seemed unlikely.

But they did.

This year, the pair finally came back onto each other’s radars when they discovered that, in a way, they again were members of the same group - albeit one far less common.

High school pilots.

“I just found out this past summer when I was doing my flight training that she was also in training to become a pilot, and so we met up after that and have been talking a little more,” Swartz said. “We don’t talk that frequently, but we text back and forth sometimes. It was very cool to know that somebody I had already known was also having the same passion as I did. When we split off and went into different schools, I never thought we would come back in such a strong way.”

Swartz, a junior at Antigo High School, earned her private pilot’s license in February after less than a year of training at the Langlade County Airport. Novy has done most of her flight training at the Wausau Downtown Airport. She is half-done with the required 40 hours of flight time necessary to seek licensure, though she flew for the first time when she was just 14 years old.

“When we were on our way out to Yellowstone on a family vacation, we stopped in Minot, North Dakota to go visit a family friend and he paid for my brother’s and my first flight lesson,” Novy said. “Minot has an on-base museum that was amazing to go see, and ever since then and meeting all those different people and being in the air, I wanted to keep being involved with it.”

To say Novy has remained “involved” in aviation would be an understatement. She is a part of the local chapter of the Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA). She’s the youth board president of the Wausau-based Learn, Build, Fly organization, a kind of club where aviation enthusiasts come to learn how to engineer airplanes in addition to flying them. Last month, she won an international scholarship specifically for pilots-in-training.

But despite her broad interest in the aviation field in general, Novy still listed her best aviation-related moment as her first solo flight, which she said happened on a day when she actually had not known she would be flying alone.

“Throughout the flight lesson, my instructor kept talking about his first solo, and I was just like, ‘Wait, this is actually going to happen. I’m going to fly an airplane by myself.’ I went out to the runway and I took off and I was just shocked at how amazing it felt," Novy said. "Everyone always tells you when you first solo that you’re going to notice the airplane climbs faster and acts different. I kind of noticed that the airplane climbed a little faster for sure. But I guess I was just going back to everything that I had learned, so making sure I was at the right altitude at the right speed for the right landing.”

After her flight that day, she spotted one of her friends, and he treated her to a typical congratulatory meal - or a typical congratulatory meal amongst pilots, perhaps.

“I walked out of the FBO (fixed-base operator) and I said, ‘Hey, I soloed,’ and he took me and my friend up to Iron Mountain and there’s a restaurant right across from the airport there and we just got some food,” she laughed.

Swartz’s interest in aviation, meanwhile, was also sparked to some degree by her family.

“My dad always wanted to be a fighter pilot in the military, but he was colorblind, so he wasn’t able to do it, but he ended up just meeting a bunch of other pilots, and being as closely involved in the flying community without actually being able to be a pilot,” Swartz said. “I kind of grew up around the airport, so it’s always been a part of my life, and I really just found a love for it in my teenage years.”

One aspect of being a newly certified pilot that the teenage Swartz has taken advantage of recently has been flying around some of her teenage friends - at least, the ones whose parents let them go with her.

“I have been giving friends rides as much as I can, but it’s really hard to convince people’s mothers to let them go on flights, which has been a funny thing, because I know my mom would never let me fly with a 17-year-old if I wasn’t the pilot myself. It’s really easy to convince my friends to go for flights, but most of the time, their parents say that they’re not allowed to - one parent wanted a picture of my license and proof of insurance before they let their kid fly with me, which I thought was pretty funny,” Swartz laughed. “It’s just a funny side effect of being a young pilot that I didn’t expect.”

Swartz is currently in the midst of accumulating more flight hours for her next hurdle, an instrument rating - a certification that allows pilots to fly with only their plane’s instruments through clouds, when reckoning by keeping sight of the ground becomes impossible - and members of her family have sometimes accompanied her on those trips.

“I’ve gone to Clintonville, I’ve gone to Superior to visit my sister - I’ve gone to a lot of places in Wisconsin,” she said. “Since I got my license, I went to Iowa once, which is the furthest place that I’ve gone. I’ve done a lot of stuff in the U.P. just for sightseeing mainly. Last weekend, me and my dad went to the Menominee-Marinette area first and then we went up by Escanaba and then to the Marquette area, which was really cool.”

And Novy, who one day dreams of becoming an aerial firefighter, has purposely logged flights in states as far away as Colorado and Montana in order to gain experience flying in mountainous regions, where aerial firefighters often must operate.

“Coming from a place like Wausau that’s mostly flat with a lot of trees, it was definitely a little different navigation-wise,” Novy said. “Mountain flying has its own different types of rules. You have to get some different training on that just because of how the air moves over there. But being with a flight instructor, it’s very safe, so I guess it was never really a challenge - it was just different.”

For her part, after earning her instrument rating, Swartz hopes to get her certified flight instructor license, then a degree in aviation from Fox Valley Tech, and then to assess her options in the airline industry, which, according to her flight instructor, Langlade County Airport Assistant Manager Alan Horzewski, could be quite strong due to her strong preparation habits.

“She is highly intelligent on the school side of things, and that really translates into studying for all those written exams and then studying for the flight lessons that we have coming up - it just makes a big difference,” Horzewski said.

Gil Buettner, Novy’s flight instructor with the Wausau Flying Service, was similarly complimentary of her.

“She’s very mature for someone that young,” Buettner said. “I think a lot of kids her age are kind of trying to figure out what they want to do in life or maybe not even thinking about it too much. She seems to be pretty certain that she wants to have a career in aviation. Aerial firefighting is certainly one that’s a little bit more challenging. Most of the time, the airplanes that are used for firefighting are more complex and powerful airplanes, so she will have to gain quite a bit of experience before she can get into that part of it. But I have every reason to be confident that if that’s what she wants, she’s probably going to get it.”