When Mavs fly: The best Omaha team you’ve never heard of soars to new heights

High above an Illinois cornfield, the plane with the “O” on its tail sliced through the cloudy blue sky. 

Cullen “Bill” Leitner steered the Cessna 152 and watched the timer. Will Skradski surveyed the landscape below for secret checkpoints, referencing a paper map to track their position. 

The duo was tasked with navigating a 125-mile route, unknown to them until shortly before takeoff, without the GPS tools pilots have come to rely on. Every second off schedule and every extra drop of fuel used counted against them. 

Twenty-eight other teams had the same assignment. None did it better than Bill and Will.

The University of Nebraska at Omaha duo’s winning flight crowned them national champions of “Traditional Navigation,” one of the 12 main events at the National Intercollegiate Flying Association’s preeminent competition. The school had never finished first in an event at Nationals. In May, the Flying Mavs did it twice.

UNO’s Flight Team, once an unserious appendage of the university’s Aviation Institute, has climbed to the stratosphere of the sport to become one of Omaha’s highest-achieving teams. 

This year, the senior-led squad took 8th place overall and set a new team record for points scored in the competition, which is run like an aviation-themed track meet.

The 14 students who make up the team balance three practices a week with rigorous aviation coursework, flight training and part-time jobs.

“I can’t offer them any money. We don’t have any NIL coming in,” said head coach Lowell “Skip” Bailey. “So it takes a lot of commitment to be able to do it.”

The team members say it’s all worth it: Competing makes them better pilots, networking makes them stronger job applicants and sharing a passion with classmates makes them friends for life. 

“All of my best friends that I have in Omaha are from Flight Team,” said co-captain Tyler Thieman, a senior from Malcolm. “There’s no doubt that at some point in (our) careers, we’ll be crossing paths.”

The team has helped put UNO’s relatively young aviation program on the map with educators and prospective students from across the country, said Aviation Institute Director Scott Vlasek. 

But the Flying Mavs are still mostly unsung in the community, Vlasek said. Asked what Omaha should know about the team, he replied, “That we exist.”

The runway to Nationals

The cars packed with young pilots drive down the taxiway at Fremont Municipal Airport and park in a patch of grass dotted with badger burrows. 

It’s nearly judgment day for the Flying Mavs — the next practice will determine who competes in the coveted landing events at Nationals. 

Each pilot gets a few turns to take off, circle the airport and attempt to land on a white line painted on the runway. Points are awarded for landing close to the “zero line,” but they can be deducted for penalties, such as fishtailing and bouncing off the runway. 

A windsock in the distance blows one way and then another before resting against the pole. Changing winds make precise landings harder, but they also give a team from Nebraska an advantage, said team member Thomas Reid. 

“It’s good because at competition, we’ve got a lot of people from the coasts and Arizona that don’t deal with high winds almost ever,” the Omaha native said. “The wind gets a little high, and they all start whining.”

The internal tryouts ended with Reid and five of his teammates locking down UNO’s spots in the landing and navigation events. 

Others earned their places on the traveling team by honing their math skills and aviation acumen for the “ground events.”

There are written exams that assess contestants’ abilities to solve flight planning and navigation questions and a visual trivia test in which they must look at a photo and guess an aircraft’s make and model.

A preflight inspection event tasks competitors with finding deficiencies — or “squawks” — in a plane bugged by judges. Several simulator events assess how well pilots can fly in challenging conditions. 

Some team members specialize in one or two events, while leaders like Thieman and co-captain Trevor Denker train for six or more. 

The season’s first competition is Regionals in the fall, where UNO faces off with other Midwestern colleges. That was often the end of the line in the program’s early days. The team failed to qualify for Nationals in most of the seasons between its founding in 1992 and 2008.

Aviation Institute Director Vlasek competed for the team as a student in the ’90s and said it was regarded by most members as a way to have a bit of fun and get free flight time. 

“Most people weren’t taking it seriously. It was on the verge of being shut down (in the early 2000s), and I didn’t want to see that happen,” Vlasek said.

Vlasek took over as coach in 2007 and sought to establish “a winning culture,” he said. That came with a new rule: Members must compete in ground events to be eligible for the more glamorous flying events. 

“It was (about) getting the kids to buy in and believe in themselves and put in the time,” Vlasek said.

UNO first qualified for Nationals under Vlasek in 2009 and has made it every year since. 

Vlasek handed the team off to Bailey several years ago. The retired Air Force lieutenant colonel flew one of the nation’s four “Doomsday Planes,” a heavily fortified Boeing 747 designed to allow the president and top Pentagon officials to command military forces from the sky during an emergency.

Assistant coach Alison Adams comes with her own competitive aviation experience. As a young pilot, she flew in aerobatics competitions, challenging gravity with loops, rolls and spins in the sky.

Together, they have built momentum and prepared the team to carry the weight of expectations.

“As UNO has become more and more competitive in flight team, there’s more that becomes expected every year,” Thieman said. “There are higher standards every year.”

Taking flight 

Days before Nationals, Shay Sinnard was competing in an actual track meet. 

The junior long-jumped nearly 18 feet in the Summit League Outdoor Championship and then hopped in the car to join her Flight Team comrades in Moline, Illinois. 

Sinnard mentally prepares for her event, a written navigation test known as SCAN, the same way she does before jumping: Fall Out Boy’s “I Don’t Care” on repeat in her headphones. The nerves before the competition are familiar, she said. 

“Walking into a test feels the same as getting into the blocks,” Sinnard said. 

As in other athletics, UNO enters NIFA competition as an underdog on paper. The school’s aviation program is not yet 40 years old. Its enrollment of 415 students is about five times smaller than regional rival University of North Dakota. Its budget is dwarfed by the leading private aviation colleges, such as Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

But Thieman doesn’t see the Flying Mavs that way. Despite facing bigger schools, UNO shows up to competitions and “everybody knows we’re gonna be one of the top teams every year,” he said.

In some ways, the tight-knit nature of UNO’s team plays to its advantage. 

Roommates Alex Duman and Reid have flown together so much that they run “like a machine” during the navigation event, Reid said. 

“Little stuff like that matters,” Reid said. “When you’re a second off starting the timer, your whole (run) is off.”

When the results were announced in a casino ballroom after all the events had ended, UNO’s deep chemistry showed up on the scoresheet. 

Reid and Duman pulled off a nearly flawless run and placed second out of 58 teams in the “Unlimited Navigation” event. Thieman and Denker, also roommates, took third place in a two-man simulator event.

Leitner and Skradski embraced in a bear hug when the emcee named them champions of their navigation event. After two-and-a-half years of trial and error, getting over the hump together was such a good feeling, Leitner said. 

They didn’t have UNO’s only win of the night. Reid, one of the highest individual scorers in the competition, got the top spot in a solo simulator event. The champs’ names will soon appear on a banner in the Aviation Institute as the first event winners in school history, Bailey said.

Southern Illinois University claimed its 10th national title, while North Dakota finished as runner-up.

The real prizes are the skills and connections young pilots take away from the competition, said NIFA Director Taylor Newman. 

Every event is designed to sharpen real-world skills that make pilots smarter and safer at the yoke, he said. Competitors also have the chance to grow their networks. 

“There’s a lot of doors that get opened here for sure,” Newman said. 

Recent graduate Thieman has already accepted a dream job flying for Kiewit’s corporate aviation team — an opportunity that came to him through Flight Team connections, he said.

Vlasek has watched as Flight Team’s achievements raised the university’s profile in the aviation world. He and Bailey have both won coach-of-the-year awards. In 2012, the team won the Loening Trophy for the most outstanding all-around college aviation program. 

But the trophy case won’t be complete until the national championship belongs to UNO, Vlasek said.

“I’ve got to have the highest goals,” he said. “Whenever that day comes, I think that’ll be a game changer for our program as a whole. I just hope I’m here to see it.”