This is the first of a series of articles about some military pilots who are all Wheatland High School graduates. The first five pilots featured in the series graduated within five years of each other.
Kyle Lenz, son of Hub and Lynda Lenz, graduated from Wheatland High School in 2009. He began his flying career after graduating from the U.S. Air Force Academy in 2013 with a Bachelor of Science in systems engineering management.
Lenz knew he wanted to fly, but that career was sealed after he went to a summer seminar at the academy. Both Lenz’s grandfathers were in the military — Hugo Lenz was in the Air Force and Howard Wattles was in the Navy.
“After completing two phases of undergraduate pilot training, the UPT students select their preference of which ‘track’ they’d like to take: fighter/bomber, transport or rotary wing. As students continue through UPT, this process repeats until ‘drop night’ when each student finds out the actual airframe they are assigned as the available aircraft are ‘dropped’ to them from higher Air Force,” Lenz said. “What one gets depends on how well the student does in training compared to peers and which aircraft the Air Force has available. I was fortunate enough to get my choices for aircraft type and base location.”
Following graduation from the Air Force Academy, Lenz went to Fort Rucker, Alabama, for helicopter training. His mom Lynda said,
“I knew he would have the best training and it was very exciting to see his dreams come true,” Lenz’s mother, Lynda, said. “Of course, I pray for him every day but I’d do that no matter what he was doing.”
Lenz flies a UH-1N Huey out of Malmstrom Air Force Base in Great Falls, Montana. He wanted Malmstrom because it is a place he could do the leisurely activities he likes — fishing and hunting — and still be relatively close to home.
Lenz piloted a Huey for a search and rescue mission in the Little Belt Mountains in central Montana.
“An individual had suffered a gunshot wound to the leg and was in a remote area that made it impossible for ground crews to transport him out or for a Mercy Flight helicopter to land,” Lenz said. “With rapidly deteriorating weather and up against the performance limitations of the aircraft, we were able to hoist our flight doc down 120 feet to the individual to package him up, and hoist them both out before the weather system enveloped the area. We then had to fly below the weather at around 50 feet above ground level along the highway to deliver the patient to higher medical care in Great Falls.”
Lenz also reiterated what most others have said about time — it flies by.
“Seek opportunities and take advantage of as many as you can,” Lenz said. “You’ll never regret taking a chance.”
