Flying, football are his passions
| Name: Chris Kupec Age: 22 Certificate: Commercial, airplane single engine land, airplane multiengine land, instrument rating, CFI Flight time: 408 hours Aircraft flown: Cessna 172 Home airport: Southern Illinois Airport (MDH), Carbondale |
Chris Kupec plays football for his college team and, like most undergraduates, juggles the demands of practice, games, and schoolwork. Not an unusual story--until you consider that Kupec, 22, is an aviation student at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale and will be the first football player to graduate from that department since 1992.
His day begins at 6:30 a.m. and ends at 11 p.m. The hours are filled with classes, study, and flight instructing at Southern Illinois Airport in Carbondale. Kupec currently has four students, all of whom are working on their commercial certificates.
Then there's football. A tight end for the SIU Salukis, Kupec is finishing up his final year with the nationally ranked Division I AA team and hopes to help them win the Gateway Conference for the third year in a row.
It's a hectic schedule, and he acknowledges that football leaves no time for him to participate in the Flying Salukis precision flight team or join the Alpha Eta Rho aviation fraternity--activities that other aviation students can enjoy without fear of missing a practice or a game.
"Coming out of high school [in Columbia, Maryland], I knew this was the life I was getting into," Kupec says. His coaches and professors "are very understanding," he adds. "They know I'm here to do both."
Kupec hadn't flown in a single-engine airplane until he came to SIU. But he was entirely at home in the skies: As a child, he and his mother, a United Airlines flight attendant, traveled to Europe "at least a dozen times" to watch his father play professional basketball. During high school, Kupec realized he wanted to travel the world, and he began shopping for colleges with flight programs. He liked SIU for its aviation program and its location--three hours from Bloomington, Illinois, where he had lived for six years. "It was like a homecoming," Kupec recalls.
If Kupec feels at home at SIU, it stands to reason that his "family" must be proud of his achievements on the field, in the classroom, and in the sky. He got a spot on the football roster as a freshman and has earned athletic scholarships in the intervening years. In November 2004 Kupec's 3.48 grade-point average placed him on a list of Gateway Conference scholar-athletes. And since that first flight, he's acquired commercial and flight instructor certificates with multiengine and instrument ratings.
Kupec has taken some of his Saluki teammates on $100 hamburger flights, including a summer weekend jaunt to Romeoville, south of Chicago. He jokes that one of the players was "a little white-knuckled" during his first time in a small general aviation airplane, but "they all know how seriously I take [flying]." And he's happy to talk about flying with his teammates, anyone who asks him about his major, or "anyone who doesn't know a lot about general aviation."
Classes will be finished and football eligibility will run out in December, but Kupec is looking ahead, applying for flight operations internships through SIU Aviation's internship program. United Parcel Service is on the top of his short list, he says, explaining that UPS internships have won high praise from professors, deans, and other students as "a really great experience to see a different aspect of aviation."
After graduation in May 2006, he'll go out into the real world--flight instructing, building time for an airline transport pilot certificate, "whatever I can do to build up my hours and get picked up" by a regional or corporate operator. For the gridiron pilot who grew up around the airlines, another homecoming lies ahead.
Jill W. Tallman is assistant editor of AOPA Flight Training magazine. A private pilot since 2001, she has approximately 300 hours.
Related Articles
