Next generation of pilots may be from the Valley. This Fresno program is leading the way

Sammy Taylor III doesn’t mind a little turbulence.

In fact, it’s his favorite thing about being up in an airplane. He finds its almost comforting, he says, like riding in his dad’s old pickup when he was young — well, younger, anyway.

At 12 years old, Taylor got his aerial start playing flight simulators on Xbox.

Three months ago, he got hooked up with the Next Generation Aviation Academy, after telling his dad he wanted to be a pilot.

So, instead of playing baseball, Taylor is at Chandler Airport in southwest Fresno on Wednesdays and Saturdays, logging hours inside the academy’s flight simulator, or going up in a real plane for quick trips following the San Joaquin River out to Kerman.

He’s not old enough to be a pilot, but he’s already had at least three hours of flight experience and a half-hour of logged time.

Mostly, he’s acquainting himself with the airport and being around planes, says Joseph Oldham, who runs the academy through the nonprofit New Vision Aviation, which he started 2018 to provide educational opportunities to disadvantaged communities and communities of color in the Valley.

As soon as Taylor turns 13, he will begin training to become glider-flight certified, which puts him a step closer to a commercial pilot certification.

He would become part of a relatively small community, Oldham says. There are only some 500,000 pilots in the whole world. Most people — like 80% globally — have never even been on a plane, much less flown one.

Taylor hadn’t until he started with the Academy.

But there is currently a huge shortage of pilots, Oldham says. One estimate, from no less than Boeing, puts the number of pilots needed over the next two decades at more than 760,000 globally. About the same number of maintenance technicians will be needed, Oldham says.

Getting young people, especially woman and people of color, plugged into the industry early could open opportunities to good, high-paying jobs.

“If they get to fly, they see that it’s not an unattainable goal,” Oldham says.

“This could be a pathway for some of these families to change the course of decades of economic distress.”

But training can be costly and inaccessible.

For instance, the kind of glider certification training offered at the academy currently involves multiple hour-long trips out to Avenal.

“That’s an impossibility for the kids who live in this neighborhood,” Oldham says.

He’s talking about southwest Fresno, where Chandler Airport is located and where the academy is hoping to pull new students.

Academy received $180,000 Wood Next Fund grant

It is getting help.

Oldham’s nonprofit partnered with Boeing to get a series of flight simulators set up at the airport and was able to hold a week-long aviation camp for Fresno Unified students in July. It also secured $90,000 from Fresno County Transportation Authority, which it is using to fund 45 glider-training scholarships at $2,000 a piece.

And just this week the academy was granted an additional $180,000 from tech innovator (and Roku CEO) Anthony Wood’s Wood Next Fund.

This is the first time the Wood Next Fund has donated to a Valley organization.

Central Valley Community Foundation CEO Ashley Swearengin says she thinks the academy earned that distinction because the program is so unique. She can’t think of another community doing this kind of work to become a major supplier of talent for the aviation industry.

The Next Generation Aviation Academy is one of 19 initiatives to come out of Central Valley Community Foundation’s 10-year Fresno DRIVE investment plan and it is much more than this one-time grant investment, Swearengin says.

It is confirmation that real long-term change is possible in the community.

“What we learned is, if we focus on symptoms, the next year that symptom is still going to exist,” Swearengin says.

The academy will use half of the $180,000 to buy a motorized glider that will be housed and used out of Chandler Airport. This will make it possible to further cut the time and cost of the glider pilot certification, Oldham says.

The rest of the grant money will be added to the student scholarships.

This means dozens more kids are going to get time inside a flight simulator, or glider, or a real plane — maybe for the first time in their lives.

“A lot more kids in southwest Fresno are going to have some really exciting opportunities next year,” Swearengin says.