Nick Lenczycki

Director of aviation to help Ozarka program soar

Nick Lenczycki, director of aviation at Ozarka College, stands with an airplane at the Melbourne Municipal Airport. Lenczycki said he is excited to get students started in the program, which will include aviation basics, safety instruction and flight time.
Nick Lenczycki, director of aviation at Ozarka College, stands with an airplane at the Melbourne Municipal Airport. Lenczycki said he is excited to get students started in the program, which will include aviation basics, safety instruction and flight time.

It may be cliche for colleges to say a student’s opportunities will reach new heights with a degree, but at Ozarka College in Melbourne, that statement will take on a literal meaning next year.

Ozarka is starting an aviation program, and Nick Lenczycki has moved from South Dakota to Arkansas to act as the first director of the program.

Lenczycki has worked at several colleges and universities in aviation programs — Averett University, Auburn University and South Dakota State University — and he said he is excited to help Ozarka start the program from the ground up.

“That was the appeal,” he said. “At all three of those institutions, you come in and you see how people are doing things and the choices that they have made, and a lot of times you’re trying to change things as you’re operating. With this new program, you can come in and do things the way you want to from day 1, and then you grow and operate the program the way you want it.”

A Chicago-area native, Lenczycki has lived in many places since he graduated from high school, but it was actually the prospect of going underwater — not flying above land — that first drew him away from home.

“I joined the Navy right out of high school, and I’ve moved quite a bit,” he said. “I’ve lived in Florida, Virginia, South Carolina, Seattle, South Dakota.”

Lenczycki said the ideas of serving his country and having educational options through the military were big draws for him to join the Navy. He served for nine years and six months, serving as a junior officer toward the end of his service.

While in the Navy, Lenczycki was on a ballistic-missile submarine, which meant he spent a lot of time at sea and not much time exploring ports.

“It’s kind of a challenge to convince people to let you come into their ports with a nuclear weapon,” he said. “There are security concerns and that sort of thing. We ended up going what we called ‘4 knots to nowhere,’ where we’d just go out into the ocean.”

When he enlisted, Lenczycki signed up to be a nuclear-trained electrician. He then got in the officer program, which is when he had the opportunity to go to college. He earned his undergraduate degree in mathematics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The program took 2 1/2 years going to school full time year-round, and he was able to fit in some aviation classes as electives.

“That ended up being my supporting course work for my math degree,” he said. “There’s a little bit of math involved in the calculations. In the 2 1/2 years I was there, I spent a lot of time flying. Then when I was back on the submarine, people would see me on my laptop doing aviation stuff. It’s kind of one of those things that you get the bug, and you have to do it.”

Despite catching the flying bug, Lenczycki had to return to the ocean. He was a junior officer after he finished his undergraduate degree, and he was back on a submarine learning the ropes.

He said that as a junior officer, “the first thing they teach you is operating the nuclear reactor and the propulsion plants, and then you move forward to the front end of the ship. Being a J.O. was nice because you go from job to job to job. I was an electrician’s assistant to the engineer, damage-control assistant, main-propulsion assistant and then the ship’s communicator. Since we had nuclear weapons, we had a whole super-secret communications system. It sounds interesting, but it’s pretty tedious.”

Many days were monotonous, Lenczycki said, but there were some interesting experiences working on a nuclear submarine. For example, when he was working in damage control, Lenczycki was told by the captain and the engineer that he had to go with them under the ship while they were doing some emergency repairs.

“I got to climb underneath this 18,000-ton ship and make sure all of the blocks were in place,” he said. “If they weren’t, there was potential for major problems. I found myself thinking, ‘How did I get into this?’”

At the end of his initial commitment, Lenczycki separated from the Navy and went back to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for graduate school, where he earned a master’s degree in business. He studied operations and finance while doing some flight instruction on the side, but then he faced a fork in the road.

“I had that life decision to make: Do I go and do business-type things, or do I instruct and stay in aviation? I decided to stay in aviation,” he said. “I have a much-better office view out of an airplane.”

His aviation-instruction career has taken him to Virginia, Alabama, South Dakota and now Arkansas. With the experience he has picked up along the way, Lenczycki said he is excited to help Ozarka start its aviation program.

The aviation program at Ozarka is still in development, and Lenczycki has a lot of preliminary steps to take before students start classes this fall. He moved to Melbourne in November and has been working on developing the curriculum and finding an airplane for the program.

“It’s all tied to doing what a lot of the bigger schools do, but for less money,” he said. “We’re always with that mindset of how we can do things the most economical way so that we don’t pass those costs to the students.”

Even on the ground and out of the classroom, Lenczycki said he is excited to meet students and help them find their niches in the aviation world. The ability to fly planes can translate to work in the military, corporate settings, commercial flights and agriculture, and Lenczycki said he wants to get to know students and help them achieve their dreams.

“We really want to make sure that we are providing a service to students,” he said. “The motto of the college is ‘Providing life-changing experiences through education,’ and aviation is one of those things for students who live in the area; they — like myself — might have never considered aviation an option. We’re eager to get out there and explain what it involves and how it’s possible. It really can take you anywhere.”

For more information on the aviation program at Ozarka College, contact Lenczycki at (870) 368-7926.

Staff writer Angela Spencer can be reached at (501) 244-4307 or aspencer@arkansasonline.com.

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