Most Lakesiders spend their Saturday mornings under blankets, catching up on some much-needed sleep, or perhaps meeting up with friends around town. Having won a prestigious scholarship through the Museum of Flight, though, Henry D. ’25 now spends his Saturdays about 5,000 feet above the ground. 

A resident of South Seattle, planes have dominated Henry’s life since he was young. “Living close to the airport, some of my first memories are of looking up and seeing these massive white things cross a blue sky,” he explains. “I was amazed, and I knew, even at that time, that one day I, too, wanted to fly.” Yet flying would remain a distant and seemingly untouchable dream for Henry until the day his family first took him to the museum. 

Suddenly, planes of all makes and models stood a mere few feet in front of him. “It’s where my love for all things flying was really born,” he remarks, reflecting on some of his first experiences there. 

Beyond physical proximity to the planes he’d admired for so long, the Museum of Flight also became an important place for Henry because of the community it provided. “Through the museum, I’ve become surrounded by an incredible group of people,” he explains. “The museum has a [network] of mentors — people who have flown before with so much knowledge to share and who want to share it with a new generation — as well as a lot of young people like me.” Specifically, he notes the integral role that the latter group at the museum has played in both his love for flying and his development: “There’s a bunch of peers that are further ahead than you are … so there’s a friendly feeling of competition, and they push you to want to really get after it,” he says.

Part of this “push” was his entrance into some of the 11 public individual flight training programs offered through the museum, where Henry has done everything from attending summer camps and classes to volunteering. Each of these programs has been an important step for him, Henry adds, in his journey to ultimately being able to fly a plane, and the connections he’s made with other aspiring young pilots through his classes continue to serve him to this day.

However, despite the value of those programs and the contributions they each made to his journey toward piloting, Henry was still a long way from actually obtaining a license and being able to take a plane up by himself. That is, until last winter, when the Museum of Flight opened applications for the Benjamin L. Ellison Pilot Scholarship.  

The Ellison Scholarship is one of many scholarships in flight training and post–secondary school flight education that the Museum of Flight offers each year for high schoolers currently enrolled in any one of its education programs, or in the Raisbeck Aviation High School, an aerospace and flight-based STEM school adjacent to the museum. The scholarship awards recipients $12,000 of funding (paid in three installments) to be spent toward training for solo flights and, eventually, the acquisition of a private pilot’s license. According to Henry, getting the license is the most important part: A private pilot’s license is the baseline for anybody who wants to fly in the U.S. “It’s kind of like a driver’s license but with a whole lot more work,” he details. “You can’t fly in clouds, you can’t fly in big planes, and there are other restrictions. But if you want to get up in the air, it’s a must.” 

Such an attractive scholarship, however, was bound to bring competition. Henry describes a lengthy application process for the scholarship, which began with two essays before the Museum of Flight narrowed the applicant pool down to a number of finalists. Those finalists participated in an interview before the winners were decided and announced. “It was a lot of work,” Henry admits, “but my family and friends helped me take my mind off of the stress of it all while I wrote the application and waited for the results.” He also credits Lakeside for the writing skills it’s given him, which he recognizes as a huge part of why his written application was accepted. 

Ultimately, out of a pool of over 77 applicants from 27 school districts, Henry was selected in May of this year as one of 14 scholarship recipients and two winners of the Benjamin L. Ellison Pilot Scholarship specifically. Though there would be a ceremony at the museum to follow, Henry still recalls the moment during a B2 period free when he found out he’d won: “I was sitting [in the WCC], not doing homework, when I saw the email from the Museum of Flight. Without really saying anything, I just got up and went to my car so I could open it in peace.”

Now that he’s received the scholarship, Henry meets once a month with what’s called the Flight Mentorship Club, a group of roughly 10 museum students who are on their way to receiving a private pilot’s license.

Once he fulfills the requirements of that course, performs a solo flight, and completes other Federal Aviation Administration requirements, he will be a licensed pilot. For Henry, though, it’s still sinking in: “It’s crazy to think that one day, you’re standing in your backyard looking up at planes flying through the sky, and the next you’re going to fly them … I still haven’t gotten over that.” Henry also doesn’t quite know yet what he wants to do with the private pilot’s license once he has it. He’s thought about aviation as a career and how to build off this first important step in flying, but in his words, “For right now, I’m just trying to survive junior year.” 

Still, Henry does imagine weekends spent gliding over the cascades or in seaplanes up to Alaska, no longer staring into cockpits, but instead out of his own.