You Can Fly programs making a difference

As 2018 wraps up, that’s a thumbnail view of the pilot community’s embrace of the You Can Fly programs, AOPA’s far-reaching initiative to get pilots flying and keep them flying, all made possible by donations to the AOPA Foundation.

Add to those results the expanding reach of the free science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) curriculum AOPA is making available to high schools; flight training scholarship awards; and growing pilot participation in the AOPA Flight Training Experience Awards program—by which pilots rate the quality of flight training they are receiving—and it paints an upbeat outlook as general aviation bounces back from a previous period of stagnation.

“The You Can Fly programs continue to grow and make a meaningful impact on the aviation community,” said Elizabeth Tennyson, AOPA vice president for aviation program operations. “In the coming year, we’ll be expanding the reach of our high school aviation STEM curriculum to thousands more students as we complete field testing of the tenth-grade courses and make them available to schools nationwide. We’ll be offering new tools for flight schools, including an extensive customer service course, to help them deliver great flight training experiences, and we’ll be celebrating the launch of our hundredth flying club.”

The 35 flying clubs launched with the help of You Can Fly’s Flying Cub initiative in 2018 brought the program’s total of clubs created to 100 since the initiative’s inception in 2015—and built on the 30 flying clubs created in 2017.

The return of rusty pilots to flying continued with approximately 5,439 inactive aviators attending 172 Rusty Pilots Program seminars, and 542 others completing the new Rusty Pilots online course with 1,354 pilots returning to flying in 2018, bringing total seminar attendance since the program began in 2014 to 19,949, and 6,040 once again logging time as pilot in command.

Excellence in flight training is critical to student success and aviation’s future. Each year AOPA honors the best of the best in the industry based on survey responses from flight-training customers. In 2018, AOPA recognized 83 flight schools and 128 individual instructors with Flight Training Experience Awards based on more than 6,300 responses to the annual Flight Training Experience Survey.

The four-year curriculum of AOPA’s high school aviation STEM curriculum meets national math and science standards and is free to any school that wants it: public, private, or charter. The curriculum is being developed in two potential career pathways for future pilots of manned and unmanned aircraft. There are now an estimated 2,205 ninth-grade students at 80 schools studying under the program’s course offerings, and 625 students at 25 schools testing the tenth-grade curriculum, Tennyson said. Additional grade-level curriculums will be introduced in the coming years.

Support for promising students is an important part of You Can Fly, and last June, AOPA awarded $5,000 scholarships to 22 recipients selected from a pool of 1,300 applicants through the 2018 You Can Fly High School Flight Training Scholarship Program.

Supporting STEM educators is another essential component, and in 2018, as the previous year, the fourth annual AOPA High School Aviation STEM Symposium, held Nov. 5 and 6 in Louisville, Kentucky, set an attendance record, with 301 teachers, principals, and school administrators participating. The 2019 AOPA High School Aviation STEM Symposium will be Nov. 11 and 12 at the United Airlines Flight Training Center in Denver, Colorado.

“We continuously evaluate the effectiveness of the You Can Fly initiatives, and we’re proud to say that they are making a real difference by making it easier to start flying, and keep flying,” Tennyson said.