(Photo Provided with Release Courtesy of the Community College of Beaver County)

Noah Haswell, Beaver County Radio News

(Monaca, PA) According to a release from the Community College of Beaver County, CCBC in Monaca has been recently awarded $285,441 through the Appalachian Regional Commission’s Appalachian Regional Initiative for Stronger Economies (ARISE). This funding will help the efforts of CCBC to address workforce gaps that are critical in the industry of aviation across 20 counties that are Applachian in Pennsylvania, North Carolina and South Carolina. According to Statista, global airline shortages are projected to reach 50,000 pilots by 2025, while the National Air Traffic Controllers Association reports that the FAA is short of nearly 4,000 air traffic controllers. $323,305 in matching funds from both CCBC and its partners will go to this project. The partners of CCBC include High Flight Academy, Piedmont Flight, St. Vincent College, Southern Alleghenies Workforce Development Board, Westmoreland-Fayette Workforce Investment Board, USAeroFlight and many others across Pennsylvania, North Carolina and South Carolina. The Appalachian Regional Commission’s goal of creating stronger multistate collaborations to build resilient economies across Appalachia aligns with this project. The Appalachia Regional Commission has invested $157 million in 56 collaborative, multistate projects through ARISE to date. CCBC’s James M. Johnson School of Aviation Sciences has a national reputation presently for both its high quality and high standards that include being the only Collegiate Training Initiative (CTI) school to operate its own tower, placing an air traffic controller in every tower in the country, putting a pilot in the cockpit of every major airline and partnering with 22 flight providers in Pennsylvania and the southeast to offer online piloting training.