Guest Editorial: Building a future

Aviation and aerospace is a thriving sector in the United States, sustained in part by commercial and recreational pilot activity and the vast array of aviation-related businesses engaged in maintenance, repair, painting, and other services. And yet, our aviation industry faces a dire shortage of trained pilots, aviation technicians, and other professionals necessary to fly, maintain, and repair commercial, recreational, and military aircraft.

The aviation workforce development provisions included in the FAA bill will build the future of aviation by making ground school accessible in high school and focusing on recruiting and educating the next generation of America’s aviation workforce. But we need to build on these successes by collaboratively addressing the future of the national aviation system.

Standing up a national center to advance aviation would help us address the demands and opportunities associated with a safe and vibrant national aviation system.

An independent, non-government center would be tasked with three key goals to support the future of American aviation: facilitate new and expanded STEM educational opportunities for high school students interested in aviation, support research and collaborate on training methods and new technologies, and serve as a central repository of safety and economic data.

The national aviation center would serve as a forum to leverage expertise from all sectors of the industry and provide resources to high school aviation curriculum developers so educators can take that knowledge back to classrooms across the nation. By making this a priority, we can ensure the next generation of GA pilots and aviation maintenance technicians are educated by highly qualified, passionate professionals and prepared with the knowledge and tools to pursue a life-fulfilling career.

The national aviation center would support research into new aviation materials, technology, and avionics. Currently, research can be fragmented and efforts can face unnecessary hurdles or artificial constraints. To break down those hurdles, the national center would empower collaborative and cross-disciplinary efforts between private sector organizations, higher education, and other relevant entities, and facilitate experimenting with and testing the latest ideas and products. Working with key stakeholders, we can pioneer future advancements for the aviation community.

Additionally, the national aviation center would serve as a national repository of safety and economic data produced and used by our aviation sector. Today, we don’t have a comprehensive entity responsible for reviewing and analyzing aviation economic and safety data, which means our community may be missing trends that if recognized and reviewed quickly could improve safety for everyone. By building a collaborative forum to facilitate the publishing of data, we can better analyze and support consensus-based standards and operating procedures that would be difficult to achieve with a top-down, bureaucratic approach.

Our aviation and aerospace industry supports more than 11 million jobs and contributes more than $1.6 trillion per year to the national economy. With a sector so large, workforce and training challenges to meet these future needs cannot be addressed by a single stakeholder. Now is the time for all industry stakeholders to come together to launch aviation into the future in a collaborative, stakeholder driven environment, where the overarching goal is promoting a safe and vibrant national aviation system.

A national aviation center focused on education, safety, and innovation would foster the collaborative partnership across all stakeholders to maintain our nation’s leadership and comparative advantage in aviation around the globe.

I am introducing legislation to create this center to help the aviation community reach new heights and look forward to talking with you about this legislation at EAA AirVenture. In the more than 100 years since Wilbur and Orville Wright conducted their historic flights at Kitty Hawk, our nation has seen aviation in the United States grow, powered by the individual passions of pilots and aviators. Just imagine what we could accomplish if we bring that intensity and support together into a national aviation center.