Always looking up

North Bellmorite finishes ROTC; now he's flying high

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Peter Kuzniewski, of North Bellmore, faced a daunting challenge relatively early in his military career. Because of extenuating circumstances, while in flight school and still attending college, he was forced to earn his pilot’s license with only seven weeks of training.

To put that into perspective, most students spend up to a year learning to fly.

Kuzniewski, 22, now a 2nd lieutenant in the Air Force and on his way to Oklahoma for further training, shrugged off the accomplishment in a recent interview. “I expect to be challenged,” he said. “I’m joining the greatest air force in the world.”

Kuzniewski spent the summer of 2015 at the Navy Annapolis Flight Center in Baltimore, learning to fly. During his training, he stayed in Springfield, Va., with his uncle Gregory Kuzniewski, a retired Marine Corps Harrier pilot. Peter said that his days consisted of “waking up at 5 a.m., driving an hour, flying for four, and coming back and studying.”

When he felt discouraged or overwhelmed by the work, he was inspired to persist by his uncl, he said. “It wasn’t something that he told me,” Kuzniewski said, “but how he affected others.”

The pilots who trained him at the NAFC were friends of his uncle. Kuzniewski said they consistently reminded him of his uncle’s skills as a pilot, “which really stuck with me.”

The desire to pursue a military career began for Kuzniewski while he was a student at Holy Trinity High School in Hicksville. Coming from a family with an extensive military background, “I was [taught] to understand sacrifice, honor and the importance of serving your country,” he said.

Kuzniewski said that, like him, many of his peers in the Air Force Reserve Officers Training Corps at Manhattan College had alpha personalities. The program is cadet-run, and when it came to making decisions, he said it was hard to find common ground among the officers-in-training. He learned, however, to speak up when he had an idea and to trust his peers’ thoughts.

When Kuzniewski spoke to the Herald, he wore a silver bracelet on which the name Col. Norman M. Green was engraved. It was given to Kuzniewski in memory of a former Vietnam War fighter pilot who crash-landed and was never heard from again. Kuzniewski and his peers were each given a POW/MIA bracelet as part of the ROTC program.

“I never take it off,” Kuzniewski said, adding that wearing the bracelet inspires and humbles him as a pilot.

In October, he will be stationed at the Vance Air Force Base in Oklahoma for pilot training. While flying, he said, he feels a sense of control that he cannot get elsewhere. “I literally have the entire sky,” he said.

He quoted his uncle’s friend, who once told him, “Once you experience it, you always look up.”