Flight Nurse Stephanie Suzadail Named Nurse.org’s Specialty Content Creator 2026

We’ll be highlighting all of Nurse.org’s 2026 “Best Of” Nursing Award winners for you to get to know over the coming days. You can find the complete list of our winners here!

While we respect and honor all nurses here at Nurse.org, I have to confess to a wee bit of a secret: I think flight nurses are the coolest people on earth.

Because what do you mean you’re a nurse and take care of people in active emergencies at 30,000 feet up in the air? It’s almost too much for my brain to comprehend, but for Stephanie Suzadail, RN, from Williamsport, PA, it’s just another day on the job.

Suzadaill is a travel flight nurse and the winner of Nurse.org’s 2026 Best of Nursing Award for Nursing Speciality Creator. Suzadail, who shares her life as a flight nurse on her Instagram account @pyrovixi, as well as her TikTok @pyrovixi, began her career with Geisinger Life Flight and has been flying with multiple services since 2018. The 4-foot-11 flight nurse describes herself as “small but fierce,” and she’s got all the creds to prove it.

Suzadail shares that she became a nurse because, according to her, both of her parents are “medical trainwrecks.” (“I say this with all the love in my heart,” she laughs.) Her mother navigated multiple autoimmune conditions, while her father owned a concrete and roofing business, prompting Suzadail to dub him a “walking trauma alert.”

“Many times, I remember helping him with wound care or watching as he navigated around on crutches,” she recalls. “I saw a lot of emergency medicine through the two of them.”

With her parents serving as her inspiration to enter the world of healthcare, Suzadail first debated going the med school route, but then, when her mental health and grades struggled, leading to a bout of academic probation and suspension, she bounced around a bit before settling at Penn College of Technology. Her mother helped her land a role as a volunteer EMT live-in at a local firehouse, which further sparked her desire to do more in the healthcare field.

“I loved the paramedic program, and while my grades dramatically improved from ‘Are you kidding me?’ to ‘acceptable,’ I still felt the call for a more rounded career,” Suzadail explains. “So I applied to the nursing program at my school and was accepted. I finished school just barely missing cum laude after six years of undergraduate.”

Despite her initial struggles, Suzadail succeeded—and then some. In addition to earning her BSN, she holds dual Master’s degrees, a Master of Nursing Forensic Nursing specialty from Duquesne University, and a Master of Arts in Emerging Media with Health Communications emphasis from Loyola University. She also has multiple professional certifications, primarily through the Board of Certification for Emergency Nursing (BCEN).

Degrees secured, Suzadail went on to work at a small community hospital as an ICU nurse, quickly moving to a small city emergency department with eyes on ultimately becoming a flight nurse. After four years, she started her flight career with Geisinger Life Flight, and she has been flying with multiple services since 2018.

Suzadail loves her job as a flight nurse, referencing everything from the variety of situations she encounters every day, the autonomy to execute traditionally physician-only skills, and bringing critical access to people in rural areas.

“I love being able to go into hospitals, use my experience to get patients ready for transport, but also starting fresh on patients who are out of the hospital,” she says. “I really love being able to step in for EMS or rural facilities that have few resources and being able to augment the work they’ve done. And well, the badass helicopters don’t hurt.”

As someone very passionate about her job, Suzadail tells Nurse.org that as soon as she landed her first flight job at age 28, she wanted to shout it from the rooftops. Flight nursing can be a very difficult field to break into, and for a young 28-year-old to nab the role is, well, kind of a big deal.

As a bit of an anomaly in the flight nursing world, Suzadail began posting on social media to connect with other flight clinicians like her and soon began having other young medics and nurses reach out to her, asking her how to get into flight nursing. She created a blog and then, when BCEN made a call for content creators in a push to help get the word out about the value of certification, she “jumped all over it.”

“I attribute a lot of my success in content creation to the BCEN Instacrew days,” Suzadail notes. “I may not have gotten a million followers, but I made meaningful connections, which is sometimes worth more in my opinion.”

Through her content, coaching, and mentoring, Suzadail says she is proud to have helped over 120 navigate their way into flight careers. “All for the low price of free to everyone because we don’t gatekeep cool jobs here,” she laughs.

Suzadail is passionate about her work in content creation because she believes she has valuable insight and resources to share with others, and because it can connect people in a way that no other platform can.

“Social media makes a big profession feel like a smaller community,” she says.

“It increases access to opportunities you’d have never had, if you know how to leverage a network,” she continues. “New advancements and new evidence-based practice are readily available for all who want it. Finally, in a career full of hardships, tribulations, and heartbreak… social media brings us together and helps us feel less alone.”

>>Listen to The Latest Nurse News Podcast

If you’ve ever wondered what a day in the life of a flight nurse looks like, you can obviously follow Suzadail’s adventures on socials, but she also broke it down for us:

Her schedule

“I work an untypical schedule as a travel flight nurse. I work 2 weeks on/2 weeks off and during my two weeks on, I work 24 hours on with 24 hours off. This is by no means a typical flight nurse schedule. That depends greatly on where you work: some are typical 12- hour shifts and some can be up to 48 hours.”

How she starts her day:

“My day starts with hazelnut coffee and heavy metal music. Every day, non-negotiable. Starting my shift, I check all my equipment, count my narcotics, and ensure my unit of whole blood is ready to go. I look over my helicopter to ensure I have enough oxygen, everything is put away and restocked, and to ensure the helicopter itself is in good condition. I have paperwork I do in the morning that mostly consists of reviewing charts of patients we transported and any outstanding training on the computer.”

How she spends her day:

“Most days, it’s a game of waiting. There are days I may not stop flying until after midnight, and others I won’t hear a peep from our dispatch all shift. My priorities while not actively flying are making sure any base chores are done, any equipment needing restocked is ordered, but otherwise rest and be ready to transport all night. This means I have planned tactical nap times while I wait for calls.

Those calls come in two flavors: scene calls and interfacility calls. If I’m called for a scene call, we can rendezvous with an ambulance or fire truck at a prehospital site like a remote helipad, airfield, or on a roadway to pick up a 911-patient and transport them to the closest appropriate facility. An interfacility call is when we go to one hospital and pick up a patient for another higher-level hospital further away.

Once the transport is done, I do my documentation, restock my supplies, and then try to take another nap just in case we get another request. Rinse and repeat for 24 hours. After 2 weeks, I fly home and enjoy my time off.”

How she winds down:

“I take sleep very seriously. Having a good wind-down procedure has changed my life. I also prioritize my quiet downtime where I check out of my thoughts: this can be reading a ridiculous book or listening to music.”

With a daily schedule like that, you wouldn’t blame Suzadail if she stuck to “just” flight nursing. But as much as she loves her job, she’s also staying busy in plenty of other ways. For instance, in addition to content creation and mentoring, she’s also researching prehospital escharotomies as part of her plans to present the topic at transport conferences.

“I’m really excited to get into the data to see how this procedure is affecting our burn patients,” she says.

The dedicated nurse is also affiliated with GSMSG, an organization building medical transport capabilities for disaster and humanitarian missions. She is toying with the idea of someday going back to school for her NP, but for now, she says she’s “very happy” with where she is.

“On someone’s worst day, I’m bringing critical care to the people who need it most,” she says. “How cool is that?”

“I get to bring the blood products they desperately need to the crash scene or help bring a laboring mom to a high-acuity NICU hospital,” she continues. “I get to deal with all ages from the womb to 100+ years old. I can put in chest tubes, perform surgical airways, and titrate eight plus drips AND get to see the world from the sky. I never have the same day, and I work with the most amazing people. What more could anyone want?”

🤔 Nurses, we want to hear from you: have you ever thought about becoming a flight nurse? Share your thoughts in the comments below.