Home

AEPA To Create National Mosaic of Aviation/Aerospace Education

If there is one thing aviation and aerospace education needs is wrangling the chaos that is the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of programs across the United States, into cohesive whole, building on one another to plug the gaps between programs. It must lead each student to the next step from kindergarten to a job in aviation, aerospace and defense. 

Tall order? That is the task the Aerospace Education Program Alliance (AEPA) set for itself, in the wake of the two-year Youth Access to Aviation Jobs America Task Force (YIATF). It is designed to bring order out of the chaos that makes up aviation/aerospace education today.

It is, in fact, creating an infrastructure the industry has long needed to connect the dots between these disparate efforts by developing a nationwide network of aviation/aerospace programs.

“Our efforts link the formal K-12 to two- and four-year colleges, technical and trade schools as well as the more informal sector now working outside the educational system,” AEPA CEO Ralph Coppola told FAAW News. “We want to bring all of them together to create a mosaic of aviation/aerospace education, each building on the other, connecting their different education levels into a smooth pipeline that ends in an industry job. I’ve been diligently working every week contacting aviation/aerospace education programs. They are all working feverishly across the country, but we need them to connect. They all want to connect. Many already have networks working at the local and regional levels. Now they are connected through AEPA at the national level.”