Fly Like A Girl Turns Pittsburgh Teens Into Drone Pilots

Nearly a dozen teenage girls spent Thursday piloting drones at South Fayette Township High School outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the latest session of Fly Like A Girl, a summer academy that has taught more than 100 girls to fly since 2023 and helped close to a dozen of them earn FAA drone pilot licenses. I’ve covered a wave of school drone programs this month, and this one stands out for a simple reason. It hands teenagers the same certificate that working commercial drone pilots carry.

Fly Like A Girl Has Trained 100 Girls Since 2023

Fly Like A Girl, or FLAG, began in 2023 as a partnership between the Allegheny County Airport Authority and the Baldwin-Whitehall and South Fayette school districts, and the summer academy has since taught more than 100 high school girls to fly drones, according to reporting from WPXI in Pittsburgh.

Three educators built it: Dr. Janeen Peretin of Baldwin-Whitehall, Dr. Kristin Deichler of South Fayette, and Emily Sanders of Beaver Area. A Moonshot grant from the Remake Learning network paid for the first professional-grade drones, which cost about $3,000 each, and covered the $175 FAA testing fee for every student in the inaugural cohort of 20.

Students in the Fly Like A Girl academy practicing drone piloting in South Fayette Township

Photo credit: WPXI

The program has grown well past its founding districts. Girls from districts like McKeesport and Ambridge have joined the cohorts, per Kidsburgh’s reporting on the academy.

This summer’s session ran July 20 through 24, from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. each day, with four days at South Fayette and one day at Pittsburgh International Airport, according to the Observer-Reporter. Registration was open to high school girls from across the Pittsburgh region.

Students Leave With Licenses, Apprenticeships, And Plans

The curriculum packs 25 hours of coursework plus five to 10 hours of independent study into the summer schedule, and it points at one target: the FAA’s Part 107 Remote Pilot Certificate, the same commercial credential every working drone pilot in the United States must hold.

The girls train on real aircraft. They steer drones through goal posts and two-foot (0.6 m) diameter rings, land them on marked pads, and sit through classroom blocks on aerospace basics, weather, airspace regulations, and drone categories.

Photo credit: WPXI

The students themselves are the best part of this story. Gracie Gonzalez, a Baldwin-Whitehall student, joined because she wants to become an EMT and imagines using drone heat sensors to find people trapped in the snow on ski slopes.

Tumi Ojo, also of Baldwin-Whitehall, told Kidsburgh she used to see drones as pure recreation and now sees a possible career. Gourisree Prasanth of South Fayette turned the academy into an apprenticeship at Pittsburgh Drone Services, where she tests robotic arms for drones.

Here is the number worth sitting with: more than 100 girls trained, close to a dozen licensed. That ratio is not a failure.

The Part 107 exam covers sectional charts and weather minimums, the kind of material plenty of adults fail on the first try. A teenager who passes holds the exact certificate that the professionals I interview every week carry in their wallets.

The Airport Authority Wants More Women In Aviation

Women remain underrepresented across aviation careers in the United States, and FLAG exists to change that in one region, giving Pittsburgh-area girls direct exposure to drone operations and airport careers before they ever have to choose a college major or a first job.

Peretin, now an assistant superintendent at Baldwin-Whitehall, told WPXI the point is exposure, whether a student ends up flying “a commercial plane or a drone.” Some girls will discover they love aviation. Others will find out it is not for them, and Peretin counts that as a win too, because they found out at 16 instead of at 26.

Photo credit: WPXI

School drone coverage keeps landing on my desk this month. On July 21 I wrote about Beaver Dam police showing their drone unit to summer school kids, and days before that about Campus Guardian Angel pitching its counter-shooter drones to Arkansas schools. FLAG belongs in the same conversation, on the happier end of it.

The pattern across all three stories is the same. The drone industry stopped waiting for universities and started recruiting in high school hallways, and the schools are saying yes.

DroneXL’s Take

This program needs to repeat everywhere. And by everywhere I mean the whole planet, because the United States holds no monopoly on teenage girls who’d take to the sky if somebody handed them a controller. Hell, I teach my girls how to fly FPV because you never know when you’re needing backup pilots.

It reminds me of typing classes. A generation ago typing was a specialist skill, then schools taught it to everybody, and life got simpler for everybody. Drone piloting is on the same path, and programs like FLAG are walking it first.

Photo credit: WPXI

This also goes beyond sparking STEM careers. Flying a drone is a skill that saves lives, and it saves more of them every day that passes. The Lake Mills students I covered last November and the Beaver Dam kids from this week’s reporting are absorbing the same lesson Gracie Gonzalez already figured out on her own: the person flying the drone finds the missing hiker, maps the flood, spots the swimmer in trouble.

The open question FLAG’s model raises is whether districts without an airport authority as a partner can copy it. The Moonshot grant covered the drones and the $175 testing fees. Most schools have neither the aircraft nor the budget line, and nobody in the program’s public materials has said yet how the model travels.

So here’s my offer, and I mean it. If they need ambassadors in Ecuador, drop me a line. I report on drones from Quito, 9,350 feet (2,850 m) up in the Andes, and I’d help a program like this plant its flag here tomorrow.