[Aviation_Students] Aviation graduate (Troy Norling - December 2002) killed in plane crash

[Patrick Mattson]

Onalaska pilot 'died doing what he loved'
By REID MAGNEY | La Crosse Tribune
http://www.lacrossetribune.com/articles/2007/05/15/news/z04pilot15.txt
ONALASKA, Wis.  Troy Norling loved to fly.

So much, that he was willing to leave home for a temporary pilot's job at a 
Montana skydiving school.

"He died doing what he loved doing," said longtime friend Dan 
Bahr.  Norling, 28, died Saturday morning along with four passengers when 
the plane he was flying crashed just after takeoff. Federal aviation 
investigators are trying to determine the cause of the crash.

Norling's family and friends remembered him as adventurous and 
good-hearted.  "He was a lot of fun. He loved doing outside sports stuff. 
He played a lot of tennis with his twin brother Travis," said Norling's 
mother, Dee. "He was very kind and good-hearted. He never got in any 
trouble. The worst he ever got was a speeding ticket."

Norling was a memorable character in Onalaska High School's Class of 1997, 
said classmates. "He was one of a kind. Quite a character. Very motivated. 
Very intelligent," Bahr said. "Quite a personality, too. Very gruff 
exterior, but very kind-hearted."   He wore his dark hair long, and had a 
habit of appearing out of nowhere, prompting friends to nickname him 
"Jesus."  "He was always ready to help anybody," recalled his mother. "He 
was always caring about other people. He was never ever mean. He'd go an 
extra mile for anyone."

After high school, Norling enrolled at St. Cloud State University's 
aviation program, graduating in 2002, according to his mother.  "He's been 
trying to do more things with flying, but it's really hard because you have 
to pay so much an hour to fly," she said. On weekends, he'd fly skydivers 
in Eau Claire.  "He found this opportunity on the Internet to have a 
full-time position for eight months in Montana. He went out there to do 
this," Dee Norling said.

The business, Skydive Lost Prairie, is about 115 miles north of Missoula, 
Mont.  "He was looking for some more experience to build up his credentials 
to get into some commercial flights, perhaps," said Bahr, who recalls 
vividly the time Norling took him up for a flight in 2002.

"We were flying over Viroqua, and we had to land in Viroqua because there 
was a problem with the lights on the plane, and he very diligently 
deciphered the problem," Bahr said. "He was concerned we may get into the 
path of a larger aircraft and end up crashing. This is how diligent he was 
in terms of his piloting. He landed in Viroqua and was able to adjust the 
plane, fix the problem, and we continued on our way back to La Crosse."

Funeral arrangements are pending, with services planned for the weekend or 
next week in northern Wisconsin near Ladysmith, Dee Norling said.


Posted by
---------------------------------
Dr. Patrick Mattson, C.M
Aviation Professor Emeritus
Retired SCSU 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.stcloudstate.edu/pipermail/aviation_students/attachments/20070515/8bd2523d/attachment.htm