By Robert W. Dalton
When he was 8 years old, Connor Hickle ’19 watched the Blue Angels soar across the sky at an airshow near Pittsburgh, Pa. He remembers the day vividly, he says, because it was the first time he thought he’d someday like to be a pilot.
Today, Hickle is a first lieutenant in the South Carolina National Guard, where he is a Chinook helicopter pilot and a flight platoon leader. Without Wofford and its ROTC program, he says, he never would have gotten off the ground.
“I tell people all the time that I wouldn’t be where I am without Wofford,” he says. “I wouldn’t have been in ROTC; I wouldn’t be an aviator; I wouldn’t have been put in the unit I’m in now, and I wouldn’t have met the amazing friends that I have.”
Hickle interviewed at another college and was told that getting into the flight training program was extremely competitive and that he should have a backup plan. He says he “pretty much wrote it off” and enrolled in a third school.
Three weeks before classes were to begin in 2015, Simon Stricklin, Wofford ROTC’s enrollment and scholarship officer, called Hickle and offered him a scholarship.
“Without ROTC, I wouldn’t have gone to Wofford,” Hickle says.
While at Wofford, Hickle served in the National Guard. In 2017, he was transferred into the unit he remains in today.
“That’s when I definitely decided I wanted to be a pilot,” Hickle says. “I realized that was the environment I wanted to be in and the job I wanted to do, and I was going to do what I had to do to make it happen.”
Hickle began flight school in 2021 and finished in about a year and a half. The program consisted of basic officer training, survival school, flying basic aircraft and moving to advanced aircraft.
“You spend the first three or four days learning how to hover,” Hickle says. “It sounds simple, but it’s harder than it sounds. You’ll be wobbling all over the place, and the instructor will settle the aircraft and say let’s do it again.”
Hickle was scheduled to fly Wofford’s current ROTC cadets to Fort Jackson in Columbia, S.C., for training over Homecoming Weekend. That mission got scrubbed because of mechanical issues with the helicopter.
“It was disappointing, but safety is the most important thing,” Hickle says. “It would have been neat to come back to where I went to college for four years, bring in a helicopter and kind of pay Wofford back for what they gave me. That was important to me.”
Hickle, who majored in finance and works as a private client specialist with TD Bank in Mauldin, S.C., will soon begin a new chapter. His fiancé is an active duty pilot who flies Blackhawk helicopters. She is returning from a year-and-a-half rotation in South Korea, and the couple will move to her new station in December.