Kalley (Diercks) Goodrich’s and Madison Yueill’s lives have followed strikingly similar paths, both while at South Dakota State University and now pursuing their careers in the sky.
Both women are Minnesota natives and are alumni of SDSU’s aviation program. Both started with other majors before earning their bachelor’s degrees in aviation education.
Now Goodrich ’21 and Yueill ’18 are pilots with SkyWest Airlines, as are their partners, and the women have become best friends.
And in February, the pair became the first known SDSU aviation alumni female flight crew for a commercial airline, with Yueill serving as captain and Goodrich as first officer on their flight from Boise to Seattle. It was their first time back in the flight deck together in five years.
Having two female pilots on the same flight is rare, with women representing only 6% of the total pilot population, according to Women in Aviation International. Arranging the Jackrabbits reunion was even more rare, given the women’s unpredictable schedules. Goodrich made it happen by checking Yueill’s schedule, lucking out and picking up an extra trip out of Boise.
“We weren’t ever expected to fly together at a professional level, but we really wanted to, … and the fact that we did get to do that was the coolest thing,” Goodrich said of their full-circle moment.
From student to instructor
Yueill now lives in and is based out of Boise, Idaho. Her fiancé, Adam Dawson, is also a captain with SkyWest.
Goodrich lives in Hudson, Wisconsin, and is based out of Minneapolis for work. She is married to Caden Goodrich, a 2021 SDSU aviation education graduate who is also a first officer with SkyWest.
“I was a flight instructor at SDSU, and Kalley was my student, so that’s how we first met. And we quickly became good friends after that,” Yueill said. They spent about 60-70 hours of flight time together, and both say it’s among their favorite memories at State.
“When I met Kalley, she was getting her private pilot’s license, which is where you can fly in a single-engine plane around on a nice, beautiful day, but you can’t fly in any clouds. … At South Dakota State, after you do that, you earn your instrument rating, which allows you to fly in clouds, where you’re only using the instruments in the airplane and you can’t see anything outside,” Yueill added.
After earning a total of seven FAA ratings, SDSU aviation graduates usually become certified flight instructors for other students for a year or two, to build 1,000 hours of flight time to apply for regional airlines like SkyWest. Making the move to a major airline usually requires 1,000 hours in a turbine jet, including hours as captain to be competitive, Yueill explained.
Right now, they’re flying 76-passenger jets with two pilots and two flight attendants per trip. All of Goodrich’s and Yueill’s trips start and end in their respective home bases, and when and where they fly in between depends on what the airline needs to get passengers from smaller airports to major hubs throughout the U.S., Canada and Mexico.
Making the switch
Both women say they got the “aviation bug” as they were pursuing other fields at SDSU.
Goodrich, from Redwing, Minnesota, started her studies as an ag business major. Two weeks in, she saw a poster asking if she wanted to learn how to fly.
“I was like, ‘Absolutely!’ … It was never a forethought of mine, just because I never had a vision of being able to become a pilot. I didn’t know a single pilot. I’m a first-generation pilot. There were no big movies or TV shows or advertisements featuring women pilots, so why would I think of being a pilot? So that poster really intrigued me,” Goodrich said.
Thanks to her influence, her younger sister, a current SDSU student, also plans to start flying in the fall, and a female cousin, who starts at SDSU this fall, is considering aviation.
Yueill, who is from Bloomington, Minnesota, was a soccer player who started as a pre-medicine/biology major and needed one credit to complete her schedule one semester. An aviation class caught her attention, and encouragement from a family friend who’s a Delta Air Lines pilot led to a new major about halfway through Yueill’s time at SDSU.
“Luckily, she let me bug her and ask all my questions, and I came to the aviation program for information. It was super easy to make the switch, and my family was so supportive,” Yueill said. “I loved traveling, I loved being hands-on with things, and I loved that my degree would give me this skill, this physical thing that I could do when I graduated.” She didn’t learn until after she started flying that her great-grandfather had a private pilot’s license.
Praise for the program
Both pilots highly recommended the SDSU aviation program, praising the support they received from all program staff and faculty who form a tight-knit group with the students.
“They want you to be successful and watch you grow,” Goodrich said. “They really did set us up to be where we’re at right now, and everyone in the department has had a huge impact on how we think and show up to work and do our jobs.”
Other graduates would likely agree, as the program has seen tremendous growth in the past five years. There were 195 full-time students enrolled in aviation education in fall 2023, compared to 139 full-time students in fall 2019, according to associate professor Cody Christensen ’05/MEd ’06. The major was started in 1999, but aviation at SDSU dates back to the 1930s.
Christensen attributes that growth to high salaries and hiring at major airlines, plus the SDSU program’s long-term recruiting plans. “Many of the students who are in the program now were first introduced to SDSU aviation through our mobile simulator that we took to schools and summer camps.”
SDSU is also training a higher percentage of women pilots than is currently represented in the aviation industry. FAA statistics from 2023 show that women make up 5.2% of those who hold an Airline Transport Pilot certificate, which is required to fly for an airline.
The percentage of female students in the SDSU aviation program has grown from 9.2% in 2019 to 17.6% in 2023, Christensen added.
Jill Fier
