Teen Face: Analy's Julian O'Leary a high flier

A lot of 4.0 students in their senior year are stressed about what college they’ll attend and overwhelmed by extra-curricular activities.

But a rare few manage to pull off juggling all those responsibilities without losing sight of the humanity of those around them, said Linda Ruder, a guidance counselor at Analy High School.

Julian O’Leary is one such student, a stand-out not only for his grades and activities such as jazz band, but for how he treats others.

“He is a lovely kid. He’s curious and determined and inquisitive and driven and so kind,” said Linda Ruder, his guidance counselor at Analy High. “He’s literally one of the most pleasant students I’ve ever counseled.”

Born in San Jose to a father from Ireland and a mother from Vietnam, Julian moved with his family to the Hessel Road area outside Sebastopol when he was an infant.

Since he can remember, he’s been fascinated with flying. For him, the highlight of trips to Ireland to visit family was the flight, whether watching the planes take off from the airport or peering curiously down the aisle toward the pilots on the flight deck.

Later, he and his brother enjoyed flying remote-controlled airplanes in west county fields, reveling in those brief moments when their craft got airborne before inevitably crashing back to Earth.

A few years ago, he attached an iPhone in a beer cooler to a homemade weather balloon outside Geyserville, a contraption that flew to an altitude of perhaps 70,000 feet before the balloon popped and it returned to Earth, landing on the roof of a storage unit near Santa Rosa Avenue. A video of the project is available here: http://vimeo.com/45049692

As a freshman, Julian began taking flying lessons at the Charles M. Schulz-Sonoma County Airport. He earned his student pilot’s license at the age of 16, soloing for the first time just a week after his birthday.

“The moment when you first take off and you look to your right and there’s no one sitting there, it’s thrilling. It was like … wow,” he recalled.

From those first solo take-offs and landings, Julian has made significant progress toward his private pilot’s license, recently completing a solo flight from Santa Rosa to Sacramento to Redding and back to Santa Rosa.

He’s got a lot of other hobbies. He’s dabbled in cinematography, producing with friends his own short gangster and zombie films. He’s also an accomplished trombone player.

But there is something about breaking free of gravity’s hold that captivates him like nothing else.

Being a commercial airline pilot is something that has always attracted him, and at this point he’s thinking he’ll study aeronautical engineering at college – maybe at the University of California, perhaps through ROTC – and then transition to an airline.

When he envisions a future career as a pilot, he thinks of the old Chinese proverb: “If your job is something you love, you never have to work a day in your life.”