Fate of Aviation School Rests With State Agency

The fate of a school to teach aircraft maintenance and related skills at the new regional airport will be determined by the Arkansas Economic Development Commission within the next few months.

A request for a $1.8 million grant from the state was mailed to the agency late last week. The money would allow organizers to buy equipment and hire a staff to start the school and operate it for the first 18 months.

“We’ll be prepared to move as soon as the decision is made,” says Scott Van Laningham, a spokesman for the Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport Authority.

Although the airport authority submitted the request to AEDC to meet state requirements, the school is being organized by a group of prominent local businessmen and politicians.

On June 26, former U.S. Rep. John Paul Hammerschmidt announced the creation of the Northwest Arkansas Aviation Technologies Center, a private non-profit organization with the responsibility of finding a way to provide skilled workers for the new airport and related industries. The answer, according to the organization’s members, is to start a new school certified by the Federal Aviation Administration to teach the skills needed by the aviation industry.

The school has the support of the local business community. The chairman of the organization is Mark Simmons, chairman of Simmons Foods Inc. of Siloam Springs. The other members of the organization’s board of directors are Jim von Gremp, a former state representative from Rogers; Ken Pummill, president of Heartland Supply Company Inc. of Fayetteville; Richard Daniel, president of FM Corp. of Rogers; Buddy Philpot, president and CEO of Springdale Bank & Trust; Dennis Anderson, director of training and communication with Wal-Mart Stores Inc. of Bentonville; and Burton Elliot, executive director of the Northwest Arkansas Educational Cooperative and former director of the state Department of Education.

The school would start as part of the University of Arkansas’ business incubator program, then move to the new regional airport. Although the grant would finance the opening of the school, tuition would pay the costs to keep the school operating.

Plans include teaching a two-year curriculum with 1,960 hours of instruction for each student. The training would focus on airframe and powerplant construction and maintenance. The estimated cost of completing the training is almost $10,000.

The Northwest Arkansas Aviation Technologies Center would be the fourth school in the state to teach aviation technology and the only such school in this part of the state. Pulaski Technical College in North Little Rock, Black River Technical College in Pocahontas and Southern Arkansas University in Camden all have similar programs.

There is a need for the school, according to the grant documents submitted to the AEDC. Last year, the Northwest Arkansas Technologies Center members asked The Sabre Group, one of the nation’s leading creators of such schools, to conduct a feasibility study. The group reported that the school would be successful and was badly needed by the state.

If the state provides the money to start the school, the organization plans to have contracts with the University of Arkansas, John Brown University, Northwest Technical Institute and the NorthWest Arkansas Community College for those schools to provide some of the course instruction.

The school will lease about 20,000 SF from the Genesis Technology Incubator program to house classrooms and laboratories. The organization also has commitments from area companies to provide scholarships for students. The organization has found the equipment the school would need to qualify for FAA certification and reserved an option to purchase it if the grant is approved.

The new airport, which is scheduled to open in November, already has attracted one new industry. Ozark Aircraft Systems LLC, an aircraft engineering and modification company, opened last year. The company announced plans recently to begin construction of a $5.5 million hangar at the new airport, the first of seven it plans to build there.

OAS expects to create 110 new jobs by the end of the year, 500 within the next three years and 1,200 within the next eight years. Company officials have expressed a concern about the lack of qualified workers in the area.

Jobs in the aviation field pay better than most in Northwest Arkansas. Most maintenance jobs pay between $10 and $20 an hour while management positions pay between $38,000 and $55,000 annually.