Lakeland College’s highly-anticipated aviation minor program has finally made it off the ground.
Dr. Kathleen Rath Marr, who oversees the program, verified last Wednesday, Sept. 21, that representatives of the North Central Association of Colleges’ Higher Learning Commission (NCA/HLC) completed their evaluation on Tuesday, Sept. 20, and have informed the Lakeland administration they will recommend the program for accreditation.
The recommendation was the primary hurdle the college needed to cross to achieve formal recognition of the minor, which is scheduled to be issued by the Higher Learning Commission in November.
Eleven students have begun classroom courses on Lakeland’s main campus, and flight training has begun at the Sheboygan County Memorial Airport, according to Joe McGeorge, Lakeland’s new instructor of aviation.
McGeorge, who recently moved to Lakeland from the Institute of Aviation at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, noted that the Lakeland program seems to already be staking out a position of success among the nation’s college flight schools.
“This program appears to have been well thought out in advance,” he said.
Some other college programs, including those at the University of Illinois and St. Cloud State University in Minnesota, haven’t fared so well. Those two programs were recently forced to close, in large part because they purchased all of their own aircraft and needed to provide expensive support and maintenance activities.
Lakeland, on the other hand, operates its program in conjunction with Frontline Aviation, the flight-training arm of Jet Air Corporation in Green Bay.
“By utilizing Frontline’s experienced flight instructors and Jet Air’s fleet of training aircraft—complete with professional maintenance services—the program eliminates many of the costs that doomed the other schools’ programs to financial failure,” McGeorge said.
The aviation minor program is a part of Lakeland’s Natural Science division, chaired by Rath Marr, who attributes much of its success to a unique combination of technical skills attained through the college’s ground school and Frontline’s flight training combined with the critical thinking students develop while pursuing a four-year degree at Lakeland.
“The combination of the two,” she said, “is something the aviation industry is increasingly looking for in the job pool.
“An additional advantage of pursuing flight instruction as part of a degree program is that full-time students are eligible for grants, scholarships, and student loans.”
Such savings can be significant, with a private pilot’s license usually requiring 60 hours of instruction. With hourly costs just over $100 per hour, that’s more than $6,000 on top of tuition, Rath Marr said.
Employment opportunities in the industry are expected to increase over the next 20 years as a large number of pilots born just after World War II begin retiring. Airlines worldwide will need nearly 50,000 pilots during that period, according to ICAO, the International Civil Aviation Organization.
McGeorge pointed to American Eagle—American Airlines’ regional commuter carrier—as an example of how sought-after commercial pilots are in the industry, even during today’s tough economic times.
“Airline Pilot Central, a reliable source of hiring information for the commuter airline industry,” he said, “shows American Eagle reducing its total flight-time requirement from 1000 flight hours to 550, and its multi-engine requirement from 100 hours to 50,” he said. McGeorge said that indicates the airline is aggressively seeking new pilots.
“They’ve hired 700 so far this year,” he said.
Frontline’s training includes Student-As-Practitioner (SAP) activities, which are already a part of Lakeland’s curriculum.
“SAP enables students to fit in more readily with the corporate structures common to the industry, and opens work-study and internship opportunities to upperclassmen,” said Rath Marr.
That enables them to work towards advanced certifications, like the multi-engine rating, commercial and Air Transport Pilot (ATP) certificates, and to qualify them as flight instructors.
Lakeland’s 31-credit minor combines ground school—during which students study basic aviation science, the Federal Air Regulations (FARs), aviation weather, and electives like the history of aviation and flight physiology—with hands-on training in a single-engine Cessna 152 trainer. Jet Air will provide more advanced aircraft as the college’s first group of students progress through the program.