Best of CASE District VI Award
 

Institution: University of North Dakota

Title of entry: Confessions of a flight simulator pilot

About this entry: On March 22, 2023, the Washington Post carried a story with the headline, “Think you can land a plane in an emergency? Pilots explain why you can’t.” Among other sources, the story quoted Brett Venhuizen, chair of the aviation department at UND’s Odegard School of Aerospace Sciences, a major source of pilots for the world’s commercial airlines.

At the end of the story, Venhuizen observes that anyone who thinks they could land a jetliner without prior experience “should go give it a shot sometime in a simulator.”

The Odegard School at UND eventually gave students, pilots, non-pilots and the Washington Post reporter herself the chance to do just that. The Washington Post then marked that event with a new story of its own, “Think you can land a plane? We put average people to the test” (May 20, 2023).

The Post story, of course, was a PR coup for UND, because it showcased the University’s state-of-the-art aircraft simulators and extensive commercial-pilot and other aerospace-industry training programs. Our UND Today story brought those elements alive for our internal audiences, especially because Pat Miller, the story’s author and a UND Today writer, had volunteered to be a participant in the flight-simulator test.

So, Pat wrote his story from a fascinating first-person perspective, while also highlighting the UND Communications work that had helped bring this story idea to the attention of the Washington Post.