Pilot’s pageant dreams taking flight

Tiffani Sky Scheller is soaring to new heights.

Scheller, who goes by Sky, is an avian rehabilitator, an aspiring hot air balloon pilot and, in March, she’ll be one of 50 contestants at the Miss USA Petite national pageant in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Under the title of Miss Montana Petite, the Kalispell resident will represent the Big Sky State on the national stage, alongside 49 other women who champion a mindset that their status doesn’t depend upon their stature.

The Miss USA Petite pageant, founded in 2009, is designed for contestants with a maximum height of 5 feet, 6 inches.

Scheller explained the traditional pageant circuit rarely awards participants who fall below 5 feet, 7 inches tall, leaving out would-be competitors such as Scheller, who proudly stands 5 feet, 3.5 inches.

Milwaukee will be Scheller’s first official pageant after she earned the title of Miss Montana Petite through a remote application process.

For Scheller, Miss USA Petite is a way to “empower petite women.”

“A lot of the times, I feel like shorter women have a chip on their shoulder,” Scheller observed. “I’m a small woman in a big world here.”

Scheller felt particularly small before she found the Miss USA Petite competition. She had tried her hand at modeling, but those opportunities didn’t come together, partially, it seemed, because Scheller didn’t fit the typical mold of American beauty standards.

The bubbly, self-assured Scheller said she fell into “a funk of rejection.”

It took a community of women to pull Scheller out of her slump and help her find her self-confidence. Based on that experience, Scheller sought out similar support and found herself among the small but mighty crowd of the petite pageant.

“You meet all these great women,” she said. “It is about competing, yes, but it’s also about everybody having a commonality.”

BEYOND THE similarities in height, the Miss Petite group appealed to Scheller’s passions for community service and self-improvement.

Scheller said the unique pageant looks for personality, service and evidence that contestants practice what they preach.

Of course, competitors also have to master classic pageantry skills. Scheller practices her walk three times a week at a local dance studio, and she’s even put together a cowgirl getup to show off her home state heritage during the costume contest in Milwaukee.

But she stressed the Miss USA Petite contest doesn’t fall into the stereotypes often associated with pageantry writ large.

“A common misconception is that pageantry is very shallow, that only beauty queens can be able to qualify, that you cannot make a difference or that it doesn’t empower women and it, in fact, has the reverse effect,” she said. “That could be so far from the truth.”

By celebrating diverse beauty standards, Scheller said, Miss USA Petite helps show small women “their height is not a limit to their flight.”

She’s committed to delivering that message far and wide.

She created a Facebook group to share the lessons she’s learned beyond the Miss USA Petite stage. The partly eponymous group is titled “The Sky is the Limit: Women Helping Women.”

Through the group, Scheller aims to bring women together to share their goals, strategies and successes. She hopes this coalition will set off “a chain reaction of empowerment.”

The group currently counts around 50 members, and Scheller is hopeful they’ll eventually be able to meet in person.

SCHELLER’S GOALS for the group are twofold: she wants the platform to bring about positive change for women, inside and out. She hopes the online community inspires others to work on themselves and on behalf of their communities. In particular, she’s using the group to gain support for Montana Wild Wings bird recovery, where she works as a volunteer.

Scheller started at Wild Wings almost a year ago after she participated in a community-led effort to adopt hundreds of geese out of Kalispell’s Woodland Park.

She’s been inspired by the birds she works with and the connection between the animals and their caretakers.

With her pageant platform, she wants to increase awareness about the plight of sick and injured birds, and raise money for the organization. She urges her supporters to use copper bullets while hunting, rather than lead, which can poison birds, and build or buy birdhouses to give them shelter.

Supporters can also help by donating to her Wild Wings fundraiser, which has raised about $400 of her $1,000 goal so far.

For Scheller, helping birds and helping people go hand in hand.

“I encourage women, basically, to do anything that makes them feel like a bird, makes them feel like they’re flying,” she said.

As for herself, Scheller has come up with a pretty unique way to get even closer to the birds she loves: she’s currently in hot pursuit of her license to pilot hot air balloons.

She spent a month in Arizona last fall training for her license, before completing the first-ever hot air balloon pilot test at the Kalispell airport. After learning from the area’s only commercial hot air balloon pilot—who happens to be a man—Scheller set her sights on becoming the first female commercial hot air balloon pilot in the valley. She plans to pursue that dream after she gets home from Milwaukee.

Though her interests are varied, Scheller said hot air ballooning is just another component of her mission of “getting women’s goals off the ground.”

“Birds and balloons really inspired me a lot on being an example to other women,” Scheller said.

“In a small town, we don’t really have a lot to go off of,” when it comes to powerful female role models, Scheller noted, so she decided to literally rise to the occasion.

The Miss USA Petite competition can be viewed from March 24 through 27 at https://www.usapetite.com.

Reporter Bret Anne Serbin may be reached at 758-4459 or bserbin@dailyinterlake.com.