Kent State aviation team flies past competition in national air race

Three Kent State University aviators have collected a handful of accolades between them, soaring above their competition.

The Kent Flying Flashes, comprised of Alex Johnson, a 2021 graduate of the Aeronautics - Professional Pilot program, and Laura Wilson, a senior Aeronautics - Professional Pilot major, won the 45th Annual Air Race Classic, bringing back three first-place awards: Fastest Cessna; 1st Place Collegiate Challenge Trophy; and 1st Place Overall,  which included a $6,000 prize as well as medals and awards for both pilots.

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Victoria Lorenzon, a senior Aeronautics - Professional Pilot major, brought back two awards from the Safety and Flight Evaluation Conference 2022— the Women’s Achievement Award and the Certified Flight Instructor Award.

"The Air Race Classic is an all women's air race," Wilson said. "This year, the route was 10 legs flown over four days, and it was just under 2,500 miles total."

Competitors flew from Lakeland, Florida to Terre Haute, Indiana between June 21 to 24 with stops in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Illinois, and Tennessee. Johnson and Wilson were flying a Cessna, but with 41 other teams in the air, there were a variety of single-engine planes racing.

After taking off, it's up to each team how much of the route they want to tackle in a day.

"We flew the race in about 17 hours," said Johnson, netting the Flying Flashes their Fastest Cessna award. They were also the fastest of roughly 20 collegiate teams.

Johnson said that preparation for the race consisted primary of practice flights and configuring their plane.

"The challenges of the route in terms of obstacles, and altitude, and then weather comes day by day throughout the race," she said.

The event, Wilson said, was a way for them to apply what they've learned at Kent State.

"We're both flight instructors...and this was outside of that It was really just applying our knowledge and trying to do the best we could," said Wilson.

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The Safety and Flight Evaluation Conference is an annual competition held by the National Intercollegiate Flying Association.

"The competition itself dates way back," said Lorenzon. "One of the trophies that is awarded every year [the Loening Trophy]  actually dates back to Amelia Earhart, Charles Lindbergh, Dr. Grover Loening — they used to give out this trophy to different colleges."

This year, Lorenzon walked away with the Women's Achievement Award and the Certified Flight Instructor Award. .

The questionnaire serving as the application includes inquiries about GPA, what the applicant does in the world of aviation, and what they do outside of flying.

"After submitting the application, along with a letter of recommendation and your resume, you are interviewed by two judges," Lorenzon said. The interview is about an hour long, and the judges are from The Ninety-Nines, Inc., a women-run aviation organization.

Lorenzon's Certified Flight Instructor award at SAFECON was a surprise. She originally wasn't scheduled for the event. The person slated to compete wasn't yet a certified flight instructor — a requirement for contestants — but Lorenzon is, so she jumped into the breach.

Entrants were presented with a prompt around which they had to craft and deliver a lesson. However, Lorenzon and her fellow contenders only had half of the scenario prior to the event, and 90 minutes to deliver a lesson once beginning the competition.

"The prompt was that you had a student pilot who had 60 hours of flight time, and they were getting ready for their final checkride, and they were struggling with a topic," Lorenzon said.

The missing piece of the puzzle was that her hypothetical student, played by one of the judges, was suffering from fatigue, causing their performance to suffer. Lorenzon was required to talk her "student" through why their performance had hit a wall.

"At the end of the lesson, there was 30 minutes left, so I debriefed with the judges," said Lorenzon. It was during that half-hour that she received what she calls "the most valuable feedback I've ever gotten in my life." The judges made suggestions about how to improve her lesson plans and ways to continue developing her techniques as a flight instructor.

"That's why I really appreciated the event, because I walked away with more than I feel like I walked in with," Lorenzon said, "and that was a really cool experience."

All three women were honored for their achievements last month at the FedEx Aeronautics Academic Center at the Kent State Airport.

Contact reporter Derek Kreider at dkreider@gannett.com.

This article originally appeared on Record-Courier: Kent State team flies past competition in national air race