Heil Graduates to Pilot

Samantha Heil, a graduate of the aviation program at Chisholm High School, recently completed her checkride to get her private pilot’s license at Enid Woodring Regional Airport. She is attending the University of Oklahoma’s flight school, considered the top program of its kind in the country.

She was always interested in aviation but had never considered it as a career until Travis Buford, aviation and science teacher at Chisholm, asked her to join the aviation program. After speaking with her father, a veteran of the U.S. Air Force and current pilot for FedEx, she got her discovery flight and that’s when she realized what she wanted to do.

Buford is retired from the U.S. Air Force and was a navigator on a C-130 with a passion for aviation that he loves to pass on to his students. Buford is teaching AOPA Foundation High School Aviation STEM Curriculum. He said when you start a program from scratch, you hope it will be successful. And when someone has as much success as Samantha and follows it as a career, it really is rewarding.

Samantha is excited to join the No. 1 flight school in the country and also loves the campus of OU, and said there are different pipelines at OU for aviation. She has a goal of being a commercial airline pilot, and said the professional pilot program at OU is what she is pursuing.

Samantha received a scholarship of $2,000 through ERDA and the Impact Partnership Grant which helped with fuel costs for her training. The purpose of Impact Partnership Grants is to connect business and industry with workforce services through local collaboration and leadership.

Aerospace is the second largest and fastest growing industry sector in Oklahoma. The Enid Regional Development Alliance uses the Impact Partnership Grant to promote careers in aerospace including maintenance and repair and pilots, as well as developing a pipeline for existing aviation support careers.