NIAGARA COUNTY, N.Y. (WKBW) — It’s been about a year since an airplane crash in Youngstown killed 26-year-old pilot Melanie Georger. Now, her family has started a scholarship fund to pass on her legacy to other women pilots.
For Melanie’s family and friends, countless hearts continue to ache.
“It’s been a day-to-day thing, some days are really good, some days are not,” Melanie’s father, Paul, said.
Paul also told me his daughter worked for Skydive the Falls for just three months before the tragic crash, and she was so close to reaching a goal she set as a teenager, becoming a commercial airline pilot.
“You need 1,500 flight hours to qualify for that, and she was at 1,450. That was her next step,” Paul said.
After the crash, I spoke with Timothy Campbell, who remembered Georger. Campbell is a flight instructor in Massachusetts and was Georger’s personal instructor in 2021 for her private pilot’s license. You can watch the report below.
While Melanie will never get her chance to pilot for a major airliner, the Georger family shared with me a statistic that their daughter always wanted to improve.
According to Women in Aviation International, only 10.8% of pilots in the US are women.
“Melanie was passionate about improving that, and we’re just carrying that through,” Paul said.
That mission brought the Georger family to Chestnut Hill Golf Country Club in Darrien Center, where they hosted the first-ever fundraiser for the Melanie Georger Memorial Scholarship Fund, which sold out golfer slots and received 200 donations to be raffled.
WATCH: Family honors late pilot Melanie Georger with scholarship fund supporting women in aviation
All proceeds are going to the Ninety-Nines, an international organization of women pilots. That money will be given out as scholarships, in Melanie’s name, to other women aspiring to be pilots.
“We just wanted to continue her work,” Paul said.
The Georger family is in the process of making the fund a non-profit organization, and the golf tournament a yearly event.
If you missed the event and would like to donate, the Georger family asks you to donate directly to the Ninety-Nines organization at https://www.ninety-nines.org/donation.htm and write down the ‘Melanie Georger Memorial Scholarship Fund’ under “Other.”
