America Needs Pilots, But Training Is Pricey. Community Colleges Are Stepping In

On L.A. County’s Brackett Air Field, just south of Mt. Baldy, in the warm, whipping California winds, seven airplanes sporting the red logo of Mt. San Antonio College sit quietly.

Each year, about 60 students train in these little Cessnas to become the nation’s next flight instructors and, eventually, commercial pilots.

A commercial pilot license is also a necessary step toward flying for an airline, and those pilots should have some leverage when they hit the market. According to analysts with consulting firm Oliver Wyman, while the gap between supply and demand of pilots has improved from projections in 2022, there may be a shortfall of up to 24,000 pilots by 2026.

Still, pilot training programs can get expensive, as students navigate an array of fees. That's left affordable community college programs an opening.

The first solo flight

For pilots in training like Mt. SAC student Zulma Hernandez, who has about 50 flight hours, her dream of flying a jet for one of the major airlines is still a ways off.

Pilot licenses require about 1,500 hours. Hernandez is celebrating smaller milestones along the way—like successfully flying solo for the first time last week, and doing her takeoff and landing entirely alone.

“It was very exciting because I had been putting myself down a bit lately because I couldn't get my landings down right,” she said. “And so I was just putting pressure on myself to get them right. So now that I finally got to the point where my landings are more consistent, I'm just finally, I think, proud of myself.”

Only 7% of commercially licensed pilots are women, and the percentage is even smaller for airline pilots (4.6%). Hernandez hopes to see such numbers change.

Hernandez said the instructors sparked her joy for aviation at her very first lesson.

“They’re very nurturing in a way," she said. "They've flown for so many hours, so they give us grace.”

Why is pilot training so expensive?

Hernandez says flight training is expensive, but enrolling in a community college program was much more affordable. She rents their cheapest aircraft, a Cessna 152, paying $90 per hour. That price includes fuel (“really nice”) though not an instructor.

David Todd, who oversees the flight training in the program, says savings are passed on to students because unlike many other programs, Mt. San Antonio College covers the cost of renting the hangar and owning the aircraft.

“Our flight school has classrooms and facilities that the student doesn't have to pay for,” Todd says. “If you go to a commercial flight school, they've got a lease, they've got hangars, they've got insurance, and that is paid for in that hourly rate. When they're renting aircrafts here at the flight school, our college manages the insurance and the hangar facilities and the aircraft. So our students are really just paying the operational cost of the aircraft.”

David Todd (left) oversees the flight training program at Mt. SAC. Christian Fajardo (right) is an alumni of the program and a current instructor, and has over 600 flight hours.

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Todd says there are many scholarships students can apply for as well, and they don’t need to have all the money up front.

“Some programs want, you know, 10,000, 15,000, $50,000 upfront,” he says. “Our students can work and just pay hourly as they go.”

Todd was part of the Mt. SAC flight school from 1988 —

“And never left,” he laughs.

Todd says there are six full-time flight instructors in the program, many of which are building up their own hours to go on and become commercial pilots.

A little plane ride to the city

One of those instructors is Christian Fajardo. He has over 600 flight hours, and took me flying in a Cessna 172, from 1978, to teach me a thing or two.

With our LAist Community Colleges Fellow, Bonnie Ho, in the back of this four-seater plane and me making far too many jokes about crashing for her comfort, we took off and headed toward L.A. on a hot, hazy afternoon.

The San Gabriel mountains are beautiful, but seeing them from 3,000 feet in the air is even more breathtaking. With Mt. Wilson to our left and Mt. San Antonio to our right, Fajardo gently explained some of the air traffic radio chatter through our noise-canceling headsets. Below us, we could see traffic building up on the 210 freeway leaving L.A.

Dodger Stadium from 3,000 feet in the air.

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Bonnie and I pointed excitedly to Monterey Park, Cal State L.A., and eventually Dodger Stadium.

As we turned the corner, so to speak, circling L.A. as it gleamed in the sun, Fajardo smiled and told me to take the wheel. (I learned later it’s called a yoke.) He had me gently turn the aircraft left and right, and get a feel for lifting and lowering the nose.

I had a death grip, but Hernandez was right: The instructors are very nurturing and Fajardo was soothing and calm. Fajardo taught me how the throttle controls the amount of fuel getting to the engine, and how to lose elevation in preparation for the landing, as we slowly circled a pattern back toward our landing strip. At 2,000 feet, I chickened out and told him I didn’t want to land.

He laughed.

“You were never going to land.”

Fair.

Christian Fajardo, a flight instructor with over 600 hours at Mt. San Antonio College, conducts pre-flight checks while explaining equipment and safety procedures to LAist reporter Jackie Orchard.

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A more accessible license

Safely back on the ground, 23-year-old Fajardo stands next to the wing and tells me what we just did is called an introductory flight, meant to help beginner students gain confidence and get excited to learn.

Fajardo, an alumnus of the Mt. SAC flight school, says the program is unique because it’s not a private, for-profit company,

LAist Community Colleges Reporter Jackie Orchard (front) and LAist Community Colleges Fellow Bonnie Ho get ready for takeoff in their Cessna with Mt. SAC pilot Christian Fajardo.

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“It's a community college. It's a two-year program. Not a lot of two-year programs have an aviation program,” Fajardo says. “This is taxpayer money right here, and it's open to anyone, right? It's actually cheaper than other flight schools. We're able to offset the cost, so that opens the doors to a lot of students who are short on resources and are not able to take the loans out to go to a big university or a big fight school.”

Fajardo was one of those students.

“I did not have $200,000 in my pocket,” he says. “I couldn't go ask my parents for money. What helped me a lot was scholarships and working part-time and a lot of studying on my own.”

Todd says the airline industry has ebbs and flows of hiring. Right now? A great time to get in the door.

“The airlines are hurting and they're growing at the same time,” Todd says. “They're getting a lot of retirements and there's a lot of growth so there is that demand of hiring.”

Community colleges fellow Bonnie Ho contributed reporting to this story.