Long-Delayed Aircraft Maintenance School to Open in 2024

With eight campus locations and enrollment in excess of 14,000 students, Chattahoochee Tech is the largest technical college in Georgia. The institution provides high-quality education at a fraction of the cost of competing area colleges. Chattahoochee Tech awards certificates, diplomas, and associate degrees in more than fifty programs of study, thereby preparing students for high-skill, high-salaried positions in some of the 21st Century’s fastest growing, in-demand career fields. 

The college also offers customized workforce training, continuing education classes, and adult education programs that include free high school equivalency diploma preparation classes.

After years of budgetary, logistical, and legal challenges, Chattahoochee Technical College, on Friday, 09 September 2022, held a ceremonial groundbreaking for a new aviation maintenance academy in Paulding County. The academy, which is slated to begin classes in 2024, will train aircraft maintenance and service technicians. Airframe and Powerplant mechanics are in critically short supply in the wake of legislative overreach prompted by the COVID panic. Legions of experienced aviation mechanics were either summarily discharged at the onset of the COVID lockdown era or fired in the wake of vaccine mandates since ruled unconstitutional. The resultant paucity of qualified maintenance personnel has occasioned acute need for training programs such as those to be imminently offered at Chattahoochee Tech’s new aviation maintenance academy.

Plans for a Chattahoochee Tech aviation complex on the Paulding Airport date to 2018, and were announced by then Georgia Governor Nathan Deal. The proposal suffered numerous setbacks, however, including legal challenges by Paulding County residents who opposed the commercialization of the airport. The conflict led to political upheaval on the county board of commissioners, as well as years of lawsuits. The establishment of an aircraft maintenance school was offered as an alternative by which the Paulding Airport’s fiscal wellbeing could be improved upon without local residents incurring the noise, pollution, air and ground traffic, and diminished residential property values inherent airport commercialization.

Regrettably $35-million in state funding for the maintenance school was reallocated to emergency relief subsequent Hurricane Michal’s 2018 landfall in southwest Georgia. State legislators ultimately secured funding for the project—but not before the school’s planned site next to the Paulding Airport terminal was commandeered by the FAA for alternate future airport development. Ergo, a new site adjacent the airport was chosen—the selfsame site on which Chattahoochee Tech has broken ground on the three-story building and hangar that will house the college’s new aviation maintenance academy.

When complete in the autumn of 2023, the academy will offer training for airframe and powerplant certification, as well as specialties such as avionics. Chattahoochee Tech president Ron Newcomb states: “Graduates of this academy will have many options.”

Georgia’s aerospace sector employs upward of two-hundred-thousand individuals and comprises industry powerhouses the likes of Delta Air Lines, Gulfstream Aerospace, and Lockheed Martin. Notwithstanding its complement of august aerospace concerns, the post COVID Peach State—after the fashion of the whole of the global aviation industry—faces a worrying shortage of skilled aircraft mechanics. That Chattahoochee Tech’s new aviation maintenance academy will be a welcome addition and a boon to Georgia’s aerospace employers is as certain as the Braves fielding a good team and the Falcons doing otherwise.

FMI: www.chattahoocheetech.edu