Small School: Big Sky

Garrett Keaough’s ’95 career in the air didn’t start with a pilot’s license, it started on a flight deck. From 1995 to 1999, Garrett served in the Navy as an Aviation Electrician’s Mate Second Class with VFA-195, working on F/A-18s while stationed in Japan. It was a hands-on education in what makes an aircraft fly, and it clearly stuck with him.

He later crossed over to the Air Force, this time getting behind the controls himself as an HH-60 rescue helicopter pilot. Garrett served with the 41st Rescue Squadron at Moody AFB in Georgia and the 56th Rescue Squadron at RAF Lakenheath in England, working his way up to aircraft commander and taking on several operations and safety roles along the way.

After leaving active duty in 2012, Garrett brought that same steady hand to the airlines. He flew the Beech 1900 for Great Lakes Airlines, then moved to the Embraer 170/175 for Compass Airlines, eventually earning his captain’s stripes. In 2018, he joined American Airlines, where he now flies as a Boeing 737 captain based out of Chicago O’Hare.

But it’s the COVID chapter that might be the best part of the story. When the pandemic grounded much of the airline industry, Garrett didn’t wait around. He started driving a school bus part-time for Mid-Prairie, a gig that ended up lasting about four years. That detour eventually brought him full circle, back to Hillcrest, driving bus for the very school he’d once attended as a student. There’s something fitting about a guy who spent his career flying fighter jets and rescue helicopters finding his way back home behind the wheel of a school bus. And proof that the best pilots know how to land wherever they’re needed.

Cody Miller ’13 got his start in 2015 as a flight instructor at New Horizons Aviation in Goshen, IN, teaching other people how to do the thing he’d fallen in love with, flying. A year later, he picked up a second gig as First Officer at Aircraft Charter Services, also in Goshen, flying a Citation Encore.

In 2018, Cody made the jump to the regional airlines, becoming a First Officer at PSA Airlines out of Knoxville, TN. That run hit a wall in 2020 when COVID grounded a good chunk of the industry and Cody along with it. This was a tough break, but not the end of the story.

He ‘landed’ on his feet at PrivateFlite Aviation in Sellersburg, IN, where he spent two years as Captain flying Citation Sovereigns and Citation Bravos. By 2022, he was back with the majors, first as a First Officer at Southwest out of Chicago, and since 2023, in the right seat at American Airlines and still Chicago based.

From a small airstrip in Goshen to the flight deck of a major airline, Cody’s path has had a few detours, but the destination’s never really changed . . . he was always headed for the sky.

These two came from the same small Iowa town and the same small school, and then, completely independently, both found their way into aviation using two very different runways that somehow led to the same sky.

Years later, these paths crossed for real in the cockpit of an American Airlines flight. AA has thousands of pilots on its roster, so when we realized that two guys from a town the size of Wellman, and graduates of the same small school, had somehow been assigned to fly together, we both figured the odds had to be something close to astronomical.

It was one of those moments that makes the world feel awfully small and gives you a deeper appreciation for where you came from. Wellman and Hillcrest are small places, the kind you might assume people leave and don’t look back. But Garrett and Cody are proof that you never really know where the people who grow up there are going to end up, or when, against all odds, their paths might cross again. And that might even be thirty thousand feet in the air.