It takes some fundraising to get one Ohio University team up in the air and this time dodgeballs will fly in order to do so.
The Flying Bobcats, OU’s flight team, will be holding a dodgeball tournament Sunday to fundraise for the national competition.
The team usually attends a regional and a national competition each year, along with any air shows that are planned in the area.
This year’s National Intercollegiate Flying Association Safety Conference will be held at the Ohio State University Airport, where more than 100 schools, from Western Michigan University to the U.S. Air Force Academy, will be showing off their planes and flight skills, said the Flying Bobcats’ captain Dylan Ewing, a junior studying aviation.
“You really compete against the best of the best,” Ewing said.
The Flying Bobcats compete against other schools in knowledge-based and flying events, said Mason Norris, a sophomore studying aviation, who is trying out for the team.
Pre-flight, one of the events that Norris is trying to compete in, tests a competitor’s knowledge of the plane by changing settings on a plane so the competitor has 15 minutes to figure out what changed in the dark.
Flying events take place while piloting a plane, with goals of landing in a target or passing something from one plane to another, Norris said.
This past year, the Flying Bobcats took eighth place overall at the national competition, one of their best performances, Ewing said. They took second place in safety last year at nationals as well.
“We always hope to place higher,” Ewing said.
In order to attend this competition, the team has to hold many fundraisers. So far, the flight team has hosted cookouts and pancake breakfasts at OU’s airport in Albany, Ohio and sold T-shirts and sweatshirts. Ewing and the team decided to hold the dodgeball tournament in order to raise more money and awareness of the team.
Flight competitions cost a lot more than just hotel rooms for the team. The Flying Bobcats will fly their planes to OSU’s airport, but to do so they have to pay for a maintenance rental fee of $160 per hour and gas prices at $6 per gallon, Norris said.
“You have to charge something for the airplane because it’s not free to just fly it,” he said.
With all the factors of fuel charges and plane maintenance, the aviation program offered by the Russ College of Engineering and Technology has upper-level courses that can cost anywhere from $3,000 to $9,000, according to OU’s aviation web page.
However, aviation students are willing to pay for the experience of flight.
“You can’t really complain about getting to go fly for class,” Ewing said.
dk123111@ohiou.edu
