(Radio Iowa) – To help meet the increasing demand for pilots, the University of Dubuque plans to offer a new Associate Degree of Applied Science in Flight Operations this fall. The campus in northeast Iowa has been the training ground for airplane pilots since 1974 and helicopter pilots for nearly a decade. Professor Tony Foster, the head of academics at the U-D’s Department of Aviation, says the new program should allow students to complete coursework and start their careers in half the time.
“We’re a year-round program anyway. We’re effectively flying 12 months a year, close to 365 days out of the year,” Foster says. “So that’s not much of a difference or a change for us as a program or as a department at the university, but this is just in terms of meeting their degree requirements. They could hypothetically get through the program in about two years instead of four.”
Some projections show up to 700-thousand new pilots will be needed in the coming decades as airlines enforce mandatory retirements, while Foster says helicopter pilots are in exceptionally high demand for things like firefighting, law enforcement, hospital E-M-S crews, the military, helicopter tours, and more. Airplanes and helicopters each offer unique challenges to pilots, Foster says, with one of the key differences being speed.
“Later on in their careers, when they’re flying jets, they have to be managing an airspeed that’s well over 100 knots on approach versus a helicopter that, of course, can hover and they can fly a lot slower,” Foster says. “The control inputs required to fly a helicopter are a little bit more complex in the sense that you have two control implements you have to manage versus on the airplane or fixed-wing side, you pretty much set the throttle and then you just control the yoke.”
Over the decades, the U-D aviation program has continued to grow in popularity, as its first class only had 35 students. “We have a few different programs within the aviation department right now, and we’re projecting a little below 500 students total come fall,” Foster says. “The vast majority of that’s going to be fixed wing flight operations students. We do have some aviation management students, and then we do have a handful of helicopter students coming into the program.”
U-D’s aviation program is expanding its physical presence, too, adding on to the Aviation Learning Center, its parking lot, the flight ramp, and two new hangars at the Dubuque Regional Airport. The expansion project should be complete in December.
