Former Phillips County resident produces documentary

Dave Kelly, a 1977 Haxtun High School graduate, recently wrote and produced a documentary film which is airing on PBS TV stations across the nation. The documentary, titled “Hearts Above Clouds,” covers 100 years of women’s aviation history in America. 

Beginning with Amelia Earhart in 1920, the program follows pioneering women pilots through the first women’s national air races. It continues with women’s air service contributions during World War II and concludes with highlighting noteworthy and courageous female aviators in the postwar era. 

“Hearts Above Clouds” is scheduled to air on Rocky Mountain PBS on Sunday morning, Aug. 6, at 10 a.m. First released in 2022, the one-hour show has aired extensively on PBS stations in California, Arizona, Wyoming, Alaska, and numerous states in the Midwest and on the East Coast. 

The popular aviation-themed historical documentary was nominated for a Los Angeles Area Emmy Award in the summer of 2022. A previous documentary Kelly wrote and produced also received a Los Angeles Area Emmy nomination in 2016.

According to Kelly, who also narrates the film, “Hearts Above Clouds” owes its popularity to presenting fascinating but largely unknown accomplishments by women aviators in national history. “Most people today don’t hear about the women pilots from 80 or 90 years ago and how much they impacted the world of aviation,” Kelly states. 

“Everyone is aware of Amelia Earhart, who was very important, but there were many other women aviators who achieved significant milestones and in doing so, inspired a nation going into and coming out of the Great Depression. Highly motivated and talented women pilots continued to impress during WWII and then in the postwar era. The personal stories are quite memorable and often very poignant.”

As noted in the documentary, there was a brief time in the Great Depression when women pilots were celebrities on par with famous male pilots of the day. Sometimes, the women garnered more media attention than the men. After Charles Lindbergh completed his famous nonstop Atlantic flight from New York to Paris in 1927, numerous women pilots took note and then took off for the sky.

In addition to writing and producing documentaries for educational television, Kelly also hosts an in-depth, heavily researched general interest talk show. Kelly’s program, “Talking Points,” appears on cable TV in California and is available on YouTube. The talk show is recorded at the Advanced Media Production Center at California State University, Long Beach, where Kelly serves as department director.

Kelly was born in Phillips County and was raised on the family farm south of Haxtun. He graduated from Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1981, double majoring in broadcast news journalism and philosophy. While in college, he began working in television news at CBS affiliate KCCI in Des Moines. 

There he won a national award as a collegiate broadcast news reporter. The award-winning story involved coverage of Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign in the 1980 Iowa caucuses. 

Kelly also attended the graduate school of cinema at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. He graduated with a Master of Arts degree in 1985. 

Rocky Mountain PBS will provide video-on-demand streaming of “Hearts Above Clouds” for the next 12 months after the Aug. 6 broadcast. To access streaming-on-demand, go to the RMPBS website, download the free PBS app, and the video menu options will become available.