A road that led to aviation
Ana Komar is the chief pilot and owner of Fly Badlands, a one-woman, one-airplane business flying tourists and anyone else who wants to learn about and experience the rugged, awe-inspiring beauty of the Badlands in South Dakota from above.
But becoming a pilot had never been the lifelong dream for Komar. “There's no other aviators in my family. Maybe when I was a kid, we went to a couple of airshows. Like, I thought it was cool, but in no way was I like an av geek,” she said. Actually, nothing was further from her mind.
When COVID-19 hit, Komar found herself on the East Coast of the United States, and she bought a Ford Transit that used to be a drywall installer's van to modify as her place to live. For safety reasons, she didn’t want to keep the external ladder to the roof, so one of the first things she decided to do was to cut a hole in the roof to be able to access it from inside the van. She said “And I was like, oh my God! I just cut a hole in my roof. How am I going to do the rest of this?” Being wired the way she is, she managed to build out the van according to her specifications, solar panels and plumbing included, adding that “YouTube was my professor.” She landed a position with an international medical organization and built out trailers for hurricane relief, using her experience from working on her own van, performing all the electrical wiring, design, plumbing, and woodwork herself. And because of that, the organization sent her to Haiti as an off-grid logistician, to design and build a hospital out of tents and generators. What was meant to be a weekslong job turned into several months until it got too dangerous for her to stay and she had to be evacuated in a helicopter.
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That turned out to be her stepping point into aviation. Komar decided she needed to become an evacuation pilot, even though at age 25 she felt she was too old, compared to people who started taking flying lessons in high school, or who’d been “aviation geeks” all their lives. Nevertheless, she felt it was the right decision and because she lived in a van, she was able to do her flight training all over the United States. She said it “was a huge advantage. I didn’t have to worry about, you know, like apartments and like leases and all that. I could kind of go where the weather was best for that time of year.” She got her private pilot certificate in Albany, Oregon, and her instrument rating in Charleston, South Carolina. She received scholarships for her instrument rating, got her commercial pilot certificate in Florida, then earned her multiengine rating in South Carolina. She accumulated 100 hours in Maine and New Hampshire by borrowing a friend’s airplane and became a survey pilot, flying the corridor from Minnesota to Ohio and Florida. “I think I landed at 106 different airports, I think 30 states,” she said.
Financing that kind of determination was facilitated by a scholarship from the National Gay Pilots Association. She was able to invest some money because as she got scholarships for most of her education, her parents gave her the money they had saved for her college education. But it wasn’t enough to get her all the way through her multiengine training, so in between ratings she would go and do production work, like costume design for a show or work on props, earning her some money and nurturing her creative side, because “flight training, it’s a lot of like the math and the physics.”
The nomadic lifestyle helped Komar with her flight training. She’s comfortable with navigating different geographies, talking to air traffic control, planning for weather, or going through Class B airspace. She thinks it’s an advantage not to fly out of the same airport for the duration of her flight training. “But it’s a different experience to be like, okay, here’s this plane I’ve never been in before. I’m going to fly it to this other state I’ve never been to before. And just like, know that I can do that.”
In March 2025 Komar had an idea. She wanted to establish her own business, flying tourists around a national park and sharing the beauty of nature and the environment. As is her way, she went about it very rationally — “there’s those two business degrees coming in handy,” she said. She decided she needed to be at an airport close to a natural attraction, but not so remote as to attract pilots only. She also wanted to be the only business offering sightseeing flights on the field and not to have to compete with others. Wall, South Dakota, fit the bill and it offered another, huge pull. “There’s this business called Wall Drug, and they have billboards going like 500 miles in every direction,” Komar said. Driving through the vast expanse of South Dakota with not a lot of opportunity to stop and restock, these billboards direct visitors to Wall and Wall Drug. The store offers free ice water and has a restaurant, mall shops, and a pharmacy, attracting 2 million visitors each year, despite the town’s having a population of only 800 and the reputation of being “the geographical center of nowhere.” And Wall Municipal Airport is just one block away. “So yeah, I wanted a location that a lot of people would be going to anyway. Then the second part was I wanted something cool to look at.” That turned out to be Badlands National Park. Its spectacular geography just lends itself to being appreciated from the air. In May, Komar bought a 1961 Cessna 182 she calls Betty, and started setting up a FAR Part 91 scenic flight business. She worked with the local flight standards district office and describes them as extremely helpful when she prepared her paperwork for the FAA. “They were incredibly instrumental of getting me up and running so quickly,” she said, eventually helping her launch the first fixed-wing scenic flight business in South Dakota in the last 40 years.
She has her own billboards, some Google advertising, and an Instagram account. Half her customers reserve ahead of time, the other half are walk-ins. And while she tries to be jovial and funny, she also points out that “I have to immediately present this as fun, yet calm and very confident, very competent pilot. I have to immediately instill this kind of trait of responsibility and reliability to my customers.”
During her career Komar only occasionally faced pushback because of her being a woman, so she was expecting a little of that with her business. So far, it hasn’t materialized. And whenever men start out a little patronizing, they normally get really quiet after the safety briefing and once they look at the instrument panel and settle into their seats. She’s never had any negative interactions with her passengers and back on the ground, they’re all appreciative of and amazed at what they’ve experienced and seen. “People not only enjoy the actual flying and what we’re seeing, but I think I am a big part of the business. It’s a very personal thing, right? It’s a little four-seater. I’m a stranger. I’m just like, here we go,” she said.
Badlands National Park’s ridges, canyons, and floodplains, formed by deposition and erosion, are best seen from the air. Flying in the area is regulated by the National Parks Air Tour Management program, which is run jointly by the FAA and the National Park Service and determines specific flight routes and minimum altitudes to protect natural resources and wildlife. Komar can fly half of a statute mile outside of the boundary or 5,000 feet above ground level when over the park. Badlands has a unique and rather compact shape. Its widest point is approximately 3 miles of very jagged terrain with flat prairie and farmland around it. “So even though we’re seeing these really, really jagged things, it is an incredibly safe flight, which I love,” said Komar.
It is amazing how everything in Komar’s career seems to be a piece of the puzzle that ultimately led her to aviation. Without her degrees, she couldn’t have financed her flight training, and without her van, she couldn’t have had such a diverse flying experience. And flight training wouldn’t have come so easily to her if while building her van she hadn’t had to learn to fail. “And I think that actually helped a lot when it came to flight training, right? Because you’re not going to get everything right on the first try and you’re going to fail sometimes. And like, if I hadn’t built the van, I would have struggled a lot more with learning how to fail. Yeah.”
She not only offers an hour of scenic flying over Badlands, but also family tours, and golden hour sunset and sunrise tours. On longer tours or while waiting for weather, she gets to know her passengers a little better. Some want to know a little bit more about her and her future plans. She tells them, “I think things are going to come together quickly. People kind of know who I am. The word has gotten out. So, I’m really excited for everything that comes out of it. After that, I don’t know, you know, maybe I will, you know, my next employer will be like ‘Hey I’m on vacation with my family. We decided to go on this flight. Actually you’re a really good pilot. You want to come work for me?’”
