Minot student earns sky-high achievement
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Kyle Kreutzbender, a senior at Magic City Campus, earned his private pilot's license through the Air Force Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps' (AFJROTC) Flight Academy program last summer.
AFJROTC is a student-led, military structured course offered at Minot high schools and designed to teach students leadership skills through practical, hands-on experience.
"The mission of Junior ROTC is to build citizens of character willing to serve the community so we're basically a character and citizenship program and we have a military structure. We just want to get them to communicate and let them learn leadership skills. We do a lot of leadership labs where they get to make decisions and plan. Everything we do after school they plan," said Capt. Scott Evans, instructor for AFJROTC.
The Flight Academy program is an eight-week summer aviation training program. Depending on students' academic performances and their abilities to fly safely, upon completion they are awarded Private Pilot's Certification. The scholarship program is a collaboration between the aerospace industry and the Air Force to address the national pilot shortage and encourage high school students to pursue aviation careers.
Kreutzbender said he was interested in AFJROTC to strengthen his leadership skills and for the scholarship opportunities. He's wanted to be a fighter pilot for the Air Force since he was in fifth grade, so joining made sense.
Kreutzbender said that applying online was easy but he had to complete an aviation qualifying test with his application. Once accepted to the program, he was assigned to one of the partnering universities, Minnesota State University in Mankato.
"It was pretty cool because in Minnesota, that's where most of my extended family lives and so I got the opportunity to fly over both of my grandparents' houses. One of them lives right off the end of the runway. So they live on like a golf course and I could look out and I could see him standing down there waving," he said.
Kreutzbender is applying to the United States Air Force Academy, a four-year university. Upon completion he will be a commissioned officer. After graduation from the academy, he will have an additional year of pilot training.
"We get a freshman through their senior year. Freshmen that are timid and shy, we try to break them free of that, challenge them, make sure they break through their fears," Evans said. "And then, as we're doing that, we build them into the leaders that they are."