Serving Lucas, Ottawa, Sandusky and Wood Counties
Oak Harbor High School senior Allie Giezie was behind the plate on May 23 as the softball team’s starting catcher, leading her squad past Ashland Crestview 4-1, which gave the Rockets their third district championship in four seasons.
But softball is far from the only focus in Giezie’s life as she is also pursuing her private pilot’s license and a career in the field.
Just five days prior to that championship, on the same day she officially became a graduate of Oak Harbor, the 18-year-old Giezie completed her first solo cross-country flight.
“It's very peaceful up there,” Giezie said. “Genuinely there is no one else up there, but it's kind of scary. I mean, you're up there by yourself. You always hope you don't hear the engine making too many noises, because then if the engine goes out, you actually have to put in the procedures you're taught to land the plane with no engine, which would not be good.
“But I think it's very peaceful and something neat that not many people get to experience. I've taken my parents up there. They've been up there in some of my lessons before, and they always thought it was really cool.”
Over the past several years, Giezie has juggled high school and travel softball, high school volleyball, working a part-time job at a local coffee shop, school, being a teenager and learning how to fly.
“That was the hardest part, trying to balance everything while keeping my academics up and then also try to study to be a pilot considering it's outside of school,” Giezie said. “There's no one else pushing me but myself, so that was kind of hard. I'd have to skip things to do that, do flight plans and all that, which is a lot to learn.”
Giezie’s father, Bill, is a retired colonel who spent 30 years in the Air Force as an engineer.
“I wasn't on the aviation or the flying side of things,” Bill Giezie said. “I was on the support side. But I worked around and alongside a lot of pilots over the years and did a lot with the aircraft maintainers, so when she took an interest in it, I had a lot of friends in the aviation field who were able to talk to her in the very early days and kind of give her a little bit of guidance and direction.”
It was that connection that helped spur the younger Giezie’s interest in aviation as she attended a job shadow day with her father back in seventh grade. She went out to the base at the 180th in Toledo, and the fighter jets were out there, and she met some of the pilots.
“I thought that was really neat,” she said, “and then when I was younger, I was like, ‘I'm going be a pilot.’ I don't remember who told me, but some older gentleman was like, ‘Girls can't be pilots,’ and that kind of piqued my interest in it.”
Thus, Giezie spoke with her parents about learning more. Her mom inquired at the airport in Port Clinton after hearing you can take lessons out there. She got her daughter on the list, and around the age of 15, she took her first discovery flight.
She’s been taking lessons ever since, and she trains on the older-style Piper Archer planes, which are all manual, no digital, and Giezie said that has been really neat to learn.
“When I was younger, we'd go to the air shows,” Giezie said. “I always thought that was neat. My dad knew all the pilots, and he worked over at Toledo, so I knew all the pilots over there. It just always piqued my interest going over there and getting to see inside the jets. And I was like, ‘I want to be a fighter pilot someday.’”
During the winter, Giezie took four-hour sit-down classes every Saturday to start learning everything she needed to know. In the summer last year, she took lessons three times a week, which consisted of two-hour training sessions.
“There's takeoffs and landings,” she said. “Once you can do that, then you’re doing stalls, steep turns. Once you learn that, then you go take a stage check with another instructor. Once you pass that, then you do your first solo, then you move on to cross countries, and you do those with your instructor. You do three of those, and then once you finish those, you go do another one with an instructor. They pass you on that, and then you go to your solo cross countries.”
That’s where Giezie is in the process right now. She took her first solo cross-country flight on May 18, and provided the weather allows it, she will do her second on June 1.
The first of those flights saw Giezie fly from Port Clinton to Marion, and then from Marion to Mansfield, where she did some takeoffs and landings because that’s a towered airport, and she was talking to air traffic control. After that, it was back to Oak Harbor. All told, it was maybe two and a half hours of flight time with all of the stopping included.
“It has been really amazing to watch her,” Bill Giezie said. “Sometimes you don't know how much she's learning or picking up on, but then when you start questioning her and when you actually get to see her operate the airplane and understand the navigation of it and understand how to build a flight plan, and she can talk to you about the direction she has to takeoff or land because of the wind, the wind speed and the weather conditions and all the things that she has picked up on, it’s really, really neat to watch.”
The June 1 cross-country solo flight will be longer. Giezie is slated to visit Lansing and Jackson, Mich. during a three-hour-plus flight.
“Once I'm done with that, then I'll do another knowledge check with another instructor,” she said. “Then, I'll do review before taking my final test. And that's a written test. And the written test is a lot. It's all the knowledge I've learned.”
Once that goal is met, Giezie has to take a check ride, which is a three-hour check with two hours of it being an oral exam. Then she has a flight exam.
And Giezie hopes to finish all that before she heads off to the University of North Dakota in the fall to pursue a four-year degree in aeronautical science and aviation. She plans on going into the ROTC and the military and flying whatever they have her fly, and then she might go into the airlines after that.
“This was not something when she was younger that I would have ever thought she would have been interested in doing,” Bill Giezie said. “Watching her actually operate an airplane, watching her get her student pilot's license, and watching her land the aircraft all by herself was really a neat thing to watch, and to just to see the confidence in her and her ability and her knowledge and being able to do it (was great).
“Then her willingness to go out of state and pursue studying commercial aviation has really been a neat thing to watch her grow and learn to do.”
Ultimately, the future can be whatever Giezie wants.
“I've had to learn to push myself,” she said. “I had to learn that pretty much no one else is going to do it. If I want it, I got to do it myself. And there's going to be a lot. I'm not the smartest kid in the room, and I have to learn. I have to work a lot harder than those kids. I've really learned that I have to apply myself and kind of do it.”
Bill Giezie said it is relatively uncommon for a female to pursue the path his daughter has, and he saw the career goal as a really good opportunity for his daughter.
“We always had a hard time finding pilots and keeping pilots in the Air Force, and the airlines were always short pilots. When she took an interest, I felt that this might be something, if it’s something she liked to do, it might be a really good opportunity for her to explore.
“I mean, aviation is definitely a male-dominated field. And in the Air Force, we only had a handful of female pilots, but I worked around a number of them over the years, and a lot of them did very well with it. But it has been a male dominated career field. I think for a young lady to go into it, it is really neat and unique to see her take that kind of an interest because there's a lot of opportunities there.”
The younger Giezie has been playing softball since 12 or 13 years old, which predates her aviation pursuit. Oak Harbor softball coach Cami Haas, who also coached Giezie on a travel team, said her senior catcher is a quiet worker.
“The aviation thing is just really unique and cool,” Haas said. “And she always was working around flight lessons with a Saturday practice schedule and things like that. She's constantly on the go with that schedule, so it’s really cool to see these types of things play out for her.”
