by Wesley Kerrick

By the eighth grade, Joslyn McMichael knew she wanted to fly airplanes for a living. With two brothers in the military, she’d been admiring aviation for some time.

“After looking into it, I decided that becoming a pilot would be pretty cool,” McMichael says.

Now approaching the end of her freshman year at Spencer County High School, she’s one of 13 students who’ve been taking part in the school’s new aviation program.

Physics instructor John Davisson teaches the class in coordination with the Air and Space Academy, based at Hangar 7 at Louisville’s Bowman Field. Students who take the class all four years of high

school and participate in two summer sessions will be able to earn their pilot’s license before they graduate.

The program isn’t just for aspiring pilots; it’s also for students who want to be an air traffic controller, an aircraft maintenance technician or even an astronaut. In the first two years, the course provides introductions to a range of aviation careers.

“It’s not just the pilot; it’s not just the glory position,” Davisson says. “There’s a thousand other people that go into making the plane fly, and all of those are very viable and often very lucrative careers.”

Before their junior year, the students will be required to choose a specific career path to study.

Walk into a side room in the school’s media center around 1:45 in the afternoon, and it might seem the students are just passing the time on laptops and playing video games. But in fact, they’re engaged in online coursework or practicing on flight simulators.

All the students are freshmen, except Mackenzie Oder, who was so intrigued by the new program that he jumped in as a junior. He’s putting in extra work to get on track for his grade level. Aviation is one of several career fields Oder is exploring. His dad and his uncle hold pilot’s licenses, as does his brother, who’s pursuing a career as a commercial pilot. If Oder opts for a similar path,

he’ll have it easier than his brother, who had to foot the cost of traditional flight instruction outside of school.

Unlike McMichael and Oder, freshman Tristan Lewis is venturing into uncharted territory.

“If I do become a pilot,” he says, “I’ll be the first one in my family.”

Since childhood, Lewis has been interested in aviation. He’s always enjoyed video games that involve fl ying something, and he’s hooked on the flight simulator.

His parents’ thoughts? “They think it’s a fine idea.”

Davisson walks around the room giving guidance wherever it’s needed. An Air Force veteran who served as a meteorologist in Iraq, he sees the class as an opportunity to expose his students to the wider world.

“It also puts a real application to some of the academic topics that we have to learn,” he says. “There’s a big physics component, obviously; there’s a lot of math in aviation that they’ve had to do even as freshmen that is above what they’re doing probably in their algebra classes.”

After their sophomore year, the aspiring pilots can participate in a oneweek camp at Hangar 7, where they’ll log 10 hours of flight time and receive additional ground instruction. The camp costs $500, but Davisson says that’s a significant discount from the cost of traditional fl ight training, which runs $125 to $150 an hour. During their junior year, they’ll be required to put in flight hours on their own time. If they go to another camp the following summer and continue logging flight hours during their senior year, they’ll be set to get their pilot’s license before graduation.

Kentucky has one of the nation’s biggest aviation industries. As Davisson has looked into it, he’s finding that the career possibilities abound.

“There are a lot of opportunities that I didn’t know existed,” he says. “And if I didn’t know about them, and I’m 38 and I was in the Air Force, a 14-year-old high school student certainly didn’t

know they existed.”

To recruit students for next year, Davisson has met with the eighth-grade science teachers and let them know what kind of students he’s looking for.

“They need to be able to work independently. There’s a lot of reading. It can’t be someone who needs constant supervision, because I have 13 people; they might be in 13 different places, because it’s an online course.”

Twenty-two eighthgraders have signed up to start the class in the fall.