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News & Media You Can Fly: PBS features AOPA initiative

You Can Fly: PBS features AOPA initiative

NewsHour segment on station’s ‘Future of Work’ series

March 1, 2019
By Jennifer Non
March 2018 Preflight
You Can Fly

Double the impact

Donations to the you can fly challenge will have lasting legacy

The late James C. Ray believed that life skills are learned through aviation, which prompted his visionary support of AOPA’s You Can Fly program to get and keep more pilots flying. His legacy lives on through the Ray Foundation’s 2019 You Can Fly Challenge, which encourages other aviators to offer their support.

Contribute to the You Can Fly Challenge by August 31, and your donation’s impact will be doubled by the Ray Foundation’s dollar-for-dollar matching grant of up to $2 million. The Ray Foundation’s grant supports the You Can Fly high school, flight training, and flying clubs initiatives. If the AOPA Foundation raises $2 million to receive the full $2 million match, this will realize $4 million in program dollars.

The AOPA You Can Fly program is getting and keeping more people flying. The funding is in recognition of the outstanding performance of the You Can Fly program.

“A key to the You Can Fly program’s effectiveness is that it supports pilots wherever they may be in their journey,” said Mark Baker, AOPA president, “whether they’re being introduced to general aviation, in flight training, actively flying, or they need help getting back into flying.”

Web: www.aopa.org/challenge

AOPA’s high school aviation science,technology, engineering, and math (STEM) curriculum is less than two years old, but it is making a name for itself. At a training session last June, teachers of the curriculum visited AOPA headquarters in Frederick, Maryland, and PBS NewsHour education editor and veteran teacher Victoria Pasquantonio tagged along.

The curriculum was created to pique the next generation’s interest in aviation, and it is already a mainstay for some 2,000 students at 80 high schools across the country. And as public awareness of the growing pilot shortage increases, “the new curriculum aims to instill in young people a love of flying, which has somewhat waned in American culture for a variety of reasons and could be key to driving more skilled workers into the field,” PBS reported. PBS gave its viewers a window into each classroom, describing how “classes offered to ninth grade students involve a mix of theory and hands-on projects.” It will provide a complete four years of study “by the 2021-22 school year, which will allow this year’s freshman class to take it all the way through high school.”

During PBS’s visit to the You Can Fly Academy, AOPA Senior Vice President of Aviation Strategy and Programs Katie Pribyl said, “At the end of the four years, the goal of the program is to provide students with the skills either to get a job in the industry or pursue a degree in a related field.” Pribyl also said that “it could never be a better time to get into aviation and aerospace.”

According to the Department of Labor, women and minorities are historically underrepresented in the aviation industry, but PBS highlighted how AOPA is working to improve those numbers. “So far, the participants in AOPA’s program are much more representative of what society looks like than the industry. Of the 2,000 students enrolled in the program, 25 percent are female, and 51 percent are minorities. That’s compared to 6 percent of pilots who are female and 12 percent who are minorities.” The curriculum is provided free to high schools and is made possible in part by generous donations to the AOPA Foundation.

Applications are now open for schools to apply to use the curriculum in the 2019-2020 school year.

Web: https://youcanfly.aopa.org

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