2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Several factors have been attributed to the pilot workfoce shortage, among them include the consistent growth of the air transport industry, expected pilots’ retirements, and high training costs. In Ohio, it is projected that between 2020 and 2030, the working population age 65 and above, across all industries in Ohio, will continue to increase by 18.4% while the working population between 25 and 64 years of age will decrease by 5.5%. This presents a challenge for aircraft pilot demand since the air transportation is expected to grow as the of employment for both airline and commercial pilots in Ohio is expected to increase by 3.2% and 4.0% respectively between 2018 and 2028. The International Air Travel Association (IATA) has estimated that the number of commercial aviation passengers would grow from 4 billion passengers observed in 2017 to about 7.2 billion passengers in 2037. This would require about 63,220 airplanes worldwide and, hence, a significant number of pilots to be trained. Undiversified pilot corps is also another challenge as currently less than one in six pilots are either women or other minority personnel.

This work therefore focuses on establishing an educational framework to help faculty in creating and delivering a sustainable aviation curriculum to be taught to high school students in the Northwest Ohio region. Specifically, the framework will be designed to deliver a meaningful education to high school teachers, who in turn will teach high school students, with the goal of attracting them to become aircraft and UAS operators. The sustainability of this project lies in the fact that the participating HS teachers will continue to teach the aviation curriculum in their respective classes, with frequent updates from the university faculty.

Preliminary objectives of such a framework include developing an engaging aviation curriculum that prepares high school students to become UAS operators and/or pilots, and employing a sustainable curriculum delivery approach by equiping HS teachers with training and support on how to teach the aviation curriculums to their students. In addition, this framework may also be used to conduct outreach initiatives to increase student awareness and interest in potential careers in the aviation industry. Due to the presence of advanced manufacturing centers with over 700 firms employing approximately 43,000 workers in Northwest Ohio, training and increasing the number of potential aircraft and UAS pilots will help in accommodating the industrial growth. In addition, The Northwest Ohio region as well as the Detroit region, has a high percentage of minority and economically disadvantaged populations. A sustainable framework to train HS teachers may also benefit the minority and economically disvandataged school districts as HS teachers can expose the students to the numerous opportunities in the aviation industry early on in their careers. In addition, HS students may get regular interactions with university faculty, research centers, and flight schools, eventually adding significant value towards meeting the national and regional workforce development of aviation pilots.