Before Saturday’s football kick-off, Captain Christian Tell has one of the coolest seats in the house. The A-10 Thunderbolt fighter sprints through the Memorial Stadium at nearly 300 mph.
“It feels great to be able to fly a fighter, which I’ve wanted to do since I was seven,” Telle said. “And because you can fly over your alma mater, it’s as cool as it gets.”
Telle and Lt. Col, graduates of the University of Illinois. Nate Sunderland will carry out a pre-match flyover before Illinois faces Rutgers. Both are pilots of the Air Force’s 122nd Fighter Wing stationed in Fort Wayne’s Indiana Air National Guard.
So how did they get the gig? Well, they asked well.
“Nate said,’Hey, we need to see if we can flyover at the U of I,’ so he said,’It would be pretty cool,'” Teru recalls. bottom.
The pair could not find the flyover online request from the UI. So they called the athletic club and the staff found the perfect date. It is a military appreciation day set on October 30, 2021.
Teru lives a lifelong dream, but his path is not always empty. The campus where he soars on Saturday is the same campus where he once arrived to become a dentist.
He was keen to take an even more introductory chemistry course until he had a fateful conversation with his first grade roommate at Bromley Hall.
After all, his roommate’s father was an F-4 and F-16 pilot of the Springfield Air National Guard.
That fact brought Teru back to his seven-year-old self while watching the US Navy’s Blue Angels aerobatic show. He was obsessed with the idea of flying to make a living.
“Throughout my life, I didn’t know how feasible it was to be a fighter pilot,” Teru said. “Until then I didn’t pursue it.”
When the second grade began, Telle started work. He enrolled in Flight Class through Willard’s UI aviation program and changed his major to Ag Business. He thought it would be a good fallback if the flight went wrong. And he joined the campus’s agricultural companion, Alpha Gamma Low.
After graduating in 2016 with a private pilot license, he received additional training nationwide for over two years, including a stop at Davis Montan Air Force Base in Tucson, Arizona. There, Teru was trained on the A-10. The jet he uses on Saturday.
He applied for “almost all Midwestern combat squadrons” and is currently working full-time in Fort Wayne. For Air National Guard, he said the location is more static than the Air Force and allocations can shift every three to four years.
Tell also serves as a squadron trainer, ensuring that his colleagues meet the annual requirements.
“I can fly jets too, so I can’t complain too much,” Teru said.
He and Thunderland will fly to Willard Airport on Friday and store their jets there until the big show the next morning.
Hopefully, with the help of the jet’s internal programming and GPS system, the flyover will be perfectly timed with the end of the national anthem.
“The time you need to pass the stadium tells you when the jet needs to turn inbound and the speed you need to get there at the right time,” says Telle. “It’s not really magic, we have a lot of help.”
Willard is only about 8km from the stadium, so UI Alum heads to see the game on their own. Teru attended Home Opener vs. Nebraska in late August.
Telle then roams the old campus to see what’s new and what’s lost since he was there.
“I have to go a little on campus to see the old places I’ve been to, but I’ve heard they broke all the bars I used to like,” he said.
For UI graduates, the memorial stadium flyover is “coolest” | College-Illinois
Source link For UI graduates, the memorial stadium flyover is “coolest” | College-Illinois
The post For UI graduates, the memorial stadium flyover is “coolest” | College-Illinois appeared first on Illinois News Today.
No comments:
Post a Comment