First passenger to land on new Cedar Rapids runway returns as professional pilot

CEDAR RAPIDS — Mallory Huntimer and her grandfather were the first people to land at The Eastern Iowa Airport in Cedar Rapids after the runway was redone in 2010. Twelve years later, in 2022, she landed on the runway again, this time as a professional airline pilot.

“I always wanted to be a pilot, since I was like 3 years old,” Mallory Huntimer said. “It really is the best job in the world. I get to look out the window all day. I get paid to look out a window. I don’t know how to explain it. I think my grandpa gave me the bug, and I just simply can’t shake it.”

Mallory’s grandpa, Jim Huntimer, had a small personal airplane that he would take her flying in sometimes when she would visit him in Sioux Falls, S.D. She was not even 5 years old the first time she went flying, she said, and that desire to be in the air has stuck with her ever since.

Her dad, Paul Huntimer, works as a general superintendent for Hawkins Construction Co. in Omaha, Neb., and has worked on construction at airports around the country. For much of Mallory’s childhood, Paul was doing work at the Omaha airport, and she got to go to work with him on the weekends and in the summer.

“I thought it was so cool, to see the airplanes taking off,” Mallory said.

In 2010, Hawkins Construction won a bid to redo a runway at The Eastern Iowa Airport, and Paul spent the summer in Iowa with his team.

It was a busy few months — the project started in June 2010 and was finished by September — and when the work was just about finished the airport management started talking about how they could celebrate the new runway.

Paul told them about his father’s plane, which Jim had built himself with the help of two of his other sons, one an engineer who designed the instrument panel and the other a naval officer who helped with the manual work of putting the plane together.

“The airport management, they made a big deal of it because we were way ahead of schedule and everything. Everybody wanted to make a big deal of it,” Paul Huntimer said. “I explained the story of how that airplane was built, and they thought that was pretty neat, so they wanted that in there.”

Mallory, who was a senior in high school at the time, was invited to fly out to Cedar Rapids with her grandpa, to be the first to use the new runway.

A few months later she started flight training, and eventually graduated from the University of Nebraska-Omaha with a bachelor’s degree in aviation professional flight.

“On the way to Cedar Rapids, (my grandpa) was letting me attempt to fly a bit, but not very well because I hadn’t started training yet,” Mallory said. “I told him all the time, ‘Thanks for the bug. It cost me a lot of money.’ Flight training’s not cheap, but man do I love it.”

Mallory and Jim stayed close until he died a couple of years ago. They regularly called each other to talk about how their flights were going while Mallory was completing her training, and he was always the first person she told when she got a new license or reached other training milestones.

“I think he was excited to have a grandchild that had the same passion as him, so it was a cool bond we shared,” Mallory said.

After graduating, Mallory worked as a flight dispatcher for a few years, and worked some other airline-related jobs to gain more management experience because she hopes to one day be a chief pilot.

She started working as a professional pilot on Nov. 30, 2021. Almost a year later, on Nov. 20, she landed at the Cedar Rapids airport for the second time in her life, this time as the pilot of a commercial airline.

“I got on the airplane and I looked at my captain and said, ‘You want to hear a fun fact? I was the first person to land on this runway we’re about to go land on,” Mallory said.

After landing, she sent her dad a picture of herself on the runway with the plane she’d flown in the background.

“It was kind of a complete cycle, if you will, 12 years later,” Paul Huntimer said.

Comments: (319) 398-8328; emily.andersen@thegazette.com