My Love Story by Michele Miller-Schlitter

Feb 2020 My Love Story by Michele Miller-Schlitter

This lovely story is the first of what I hope are many entries in our “My Love Story” blog posting contest. Thank you to Michele Miller-Schlitter and her husband, the famous RANS Aircraft designer & owner, Randy Schlitter, for sharing your love story!!  Click for details on how to enter ‘My Love Story’ contest.

So happy to be engaged!

My love story started at Sun-n-Fun.  I was introduced to my husband by my dad.  My dad owned a RANS airplane and we went to say hello to the owner of RANS, Randy Schlitter.

We didn’t start dating for over a year after that.  Once we did, the commutes started!  I lived in Indiana and he lived in Kansas…that’s a long commute!  We did it about every way you can. We flew RANS planes, commercial planes and drove (a lot!).  I ended up putting a lot of miles on my car over that 5 years of commuting!

After 5 years and tons of flying adventures all over the U.S., Randy proposed. We just happened to be flying into the busiest airport in the world (for one week a year) at that moment!  Yup, you guessed it.  We were flying into Oshkosh for AirVenture!  He had asked me to take the controls.  I didn’t think anything of it until I realized we were coming up on the spot where they ask you to wag your wings.  That’s when I started thinking that maybe it would be better for him to take over, since he’d done it before many, many times!  Before I could ask him to do so, he came out with a ring and proposed.  I was so over-the-moon excited I just quit flying!  Luckily, he was prepared for that.

You want to know what the hardest part of being proposed to in an airplane is?  You can’t jump up and down in your excitement!  So, I just cried happy tears all the way to our spot at OSH.

I think someone was scared LOL

Over the next two years I moved to Kansas and went to work full-time for RANS, where we design, manufacture, and build kit and ready-to-fly aircraft.  We have had tons of flying adventures and tons of fun.  We got married on our runway July 20, 2016.

Wedding

Wedding

Randy flew in for the wedding and then we flew off together into the sunset (literally).  It’s been an awesome adventure.

I’ve learned to fly, seen most of the U.S. from the air, seen aircraft designed from a napkin drawing, and met some of the most awesome people on the planet.  I’m blessed beyond words.  My life is one big adventure and it’s fun.  Really, really fun!

One of our trips to Devils Tower