CityView Magazine

12 September 2023 You didn't have to know how to drive to enjoy the full experience. "I was surprised," says 12-year-old Cameron Mitchell, a seventh-grader at Max Abbott Middle School. "I didn't think they would let me fly it. It was a little intimidating at first, and then I got really used to it. "It was just really cool to learn how to fly and how to control like the yoke and the yaw and the turning, the signals that you use if there's any traffic in the area." Like Lopez-Andujar, Mitchell had flown before, but he had never sat in a cockpit. Coleman is hoping that first experience at the controls might lead to a career in aviation for some of these youngsters. "e purpose and vision from the state's perspective and our perspective is to make sure we reach out to communities that normally don't have pilots come from them," says Coleman, who has been airport director for three years aer starting as an intern in 1993. "So we went to several schools that had that demographic associated with it." Coleman says another goal is to help alleviate a shortage of pilots. "e bottom line is, we wanted to make sure we filled the aviation pipeline because when it comes to regional airports like Fayetteville, we are suffering right now with the pilot shortage," Coleman says. "When cuts come, they usually come to regional airports first, so it's kind of incumbent upon us to make sure that we have a backfill that is being lost right now." Fayetteville Regional Airport received a $3,000 grant from the North Carolina Department of Transportation's Division of Aviation for the past two years as seed money for the aviation academy. It is one of 10 public airports in the state hosting the program. 'A lot easier than I thought' Several companies offer support through funding and providing equipment and employees' time to teach students the finer points of aviation. One of them is Cape Fear Aviation, whose

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