Kids & Family

Westchester Native Flies High in Kansas

Jennifer McLean grew up in Sleepy Hollow and then Pleasantville, but her dreams of flying over the Hudson Valley have taken her temporarily to Kansas. 

McLean is a senior at Kansas State University, one of the few schools around where she could get her helicopter’s license, but she hasn’t stopped at that. She’s licensed to fly commercial airplanes and is instrument-rated. She’s licensed for private helicopters. Finally, she’s working on her Flight Instructor certification. 

This summer she is gearing up for (and raising money to fund) a women’s airborne race in four days across 11 states called the Air Race Classic

Ultimately McLean, very much a woman with a plan, wants to come back here to the Northeast to fly helicopters for the Westchester or New York City police force. 

What may be a mother’s worse nightmare (her mom is nervous to fly in general, let alone when her daughter is at the controls) is a father’s dream continued. McLean’s father has his private pilot’s license. In high school McLean said she started expressing her own desire to take flight. Before even getting behind the controls herself, she knew she wanted to study aviation in college. Her father suggested she take a flight first. And he thought fixed-wing might be better. But no, “I liked to be more difficult,” McLean said, opting for the excitement and challenge of helicopters. 

Her first flight was a Robinson 44 over NYC, “and I loved it. Wow. I’ve got to do this for the rest of the my life,” she said. 

KSU is one of the few aviation programs offering helicopter training, so this gung-ho teen at the time simply said, “Sign me up.” She was registered before she even saw the place. “I literally hopped on a plane and came for enrollment day.” 

There they talked her into starting with a six-wing airplane – first she got her private instruction in commercial flight, then she switched to helicopters. Helicopters, she said, are just “awesome.”

From that first “discovery flight” over the city when she had help and was still “all over the place; it’s really hard”, she was in love. 

McLean said the learning curve with a fixed wing plane is much faster than with a helicopter. While a plane might take a few hours to land on one’s own, the helicopter takes “hours and hours just to hover” and then “hours and hours to land.” 

She likens it to “balancing yourself on a beach ball with one leg up, rubbing your head and singing the national anthem.”

As these sort of pursuits are quite expensive, most flight students go the route of teaching to get their practice hours in while getting paid. McLean is doing the same, and figures it’s these hours clocked in which places the Westchester PD would be looking at. 

Her majors sound impressive as well: a bachelor in tech management with an emphasis in aviation; an associates in pilot with minor in business. Coming soon: certified flight instructor able to teach off the instruments. 

McLean’s education has entailed learning everything from aerodynamics to meteorology, aviation safety to how the body gets affected in the air. “I’ve been busy here,” she said. 

She and two women classmates (one other pilot Tonya Hodson whom she’ll trade off with) and one back seat navigator, Karen Morrison, will be among the 47 teams in the Air Race Classic in June. From June 18 to 21, the three women will fly a 2,500 miles from Pasco, Washington to Fayetteville, Arkansas. Their plane, a Cessna Skyhawk 172S is a “a little four-seater.” McLean said. 

The women plan their own route and the timing, dealing with weather, headwind, fuel stops, and sleeping in hotels along the way. This will be the first time McLean’s been able to enter this competition as she was grounded last time from an ACL injury she suffered playing basketball. 

“It’s real-time experience,” she said. It will be for viewers too, as they’ll be able to watch livestreaming footage of the race on Facebook. 

Aviation is a brave major for anyone to take on, especially a woman. “I think that it’s a major that’s underrated,” said McLean. “It’s rare to do aviation as a major, especially as a female.” 

Times have certainly changed for the aviation industry overall – once treated like “celebrities”, pilots now earn peanuts and work infamously bad hours, McLean said. Some of her friends will start at commercial airlines for salaries of $13,000 to $17,000 a year. “It’s a rough industry.” But, McLean thinks, “shortly there will be a shortage” and demand will rise. She also expects to see more women like herself joining this male-dominated field. 

McLean’s taking a practical route to her dreams with her plans of joining the police force, but even then there’s no guarantee she’ll fly any time soon. “It teaches you team work,” she says of the groundwork the force requires first. “It’s more of a privilege to fly.” 

Whatever her path, you can count on a proud dad at home. McLean said her father is severely color blind and couldn’t get all the ratings he wanted to get to go as far in the field as he might have wished. “Whenever he meets someone new, the first thing he tells them is that his daughter is in aviation… He’s really proud.” 

For more info on the Air Race Classic, check out their website at http://airraceclassic.org/. To donate specifically to the KS Wildcat flight team McLean is on, you can mail a check to: Kansas State University Salina, Attn: Amy Cole, 2310 Centennial Rd Salina, KS, 67401. “Checks should be written to Kansas State Salina Foundation and in Memo be sure to put Air Race Classic or Air Race Club so that way it goes to our club,” McLean said. 

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