WALLENPAUPACK AREA SCHOOL DISTRICT — Standing in the Wallenpaupack High School aviation classroom, program founder Eric Greenberger shows off a wall of pictures of current and former …
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WALLENPAUPACK AREA SCHOOL DISTRICT — Standing in the Wallenpaupack High School aviation classroom, program founder Eric Greenberger shows off a wall of pictures of current and former students.
The wall shows off some of the many Wallenpaupack students who have taken to the air—not all of the pictures are on the wall right now, Greenberger explains, because the classroom is currently “in transition.” He points out individual pictures of students who have found their homes in the aviation industry. One is going into the airlines in Virginia, he says; another has an apprenticeship program lined up in maintenance for when he graduates in June; another still is flying helicopters in the Army.
“It’s supply and demand,” says Greenberger. “For most of the career preparation that we are providing for students at Wallenpaupack, the supply is kind of there. For aviation, the supply is not there.”
The Wallenpaupack Aeronautical Science and Aviation (WASA) program aims to provide students with all the training and the connections they need to go straight from the flight simulators tucked into a high school classroom to anywhere they want to go within the aviation world.
WASA began as an afterschool club back in 2021. Since then, buoyed by a wave of support from airline industry professionals and members of the local community, it has become a thriving part of Wallenpaupack’s academic offerings—the program’s classes are full, and it has plans to expand into another classroom come fall, says Greenberger.
“We are specifically targeting four pathways,” Greenberger explains: “professional pilot, air traffic control, aviation maintenance and aviation management.” Students learn about all those career pathways through WASA, picking up the skills needed to join the aviation industry wherever they want to land.
It’s a unique approach, says Greenberger: “We’re officially the only high school aviation program that’s doing what we’re doing in the way that we’re doing it.”
It’s one that gets students with the program engaged.
“The aviation industry is really big, and it’s also really welcoming,” says Cameron Ortiz, a junior with WASA. He says while he’s struggled to feel like he belongs in the other fields he’s tried to enter, “aviation just kind of sticks out.”
“It just makes me feel like I can actually do it, like I can actually achieve what I want to achieve,” he adds.
Cameron has a specific goal in mind for himself upon entering the aviation industry. He wants to sit in the pilot’s seat of a Boeing 737 airliner, either for Jet Blue or Southwest—those airlines “just have really good pay, to be frank.”
Other WASA students aren’t as sure where they want to end up. Ashton Fabri, a senior, says he’s torn between the pilot track and the mechanics track—he’s into the mechanics, but he’s also working toward getting his private pilot’s license.
Whichever tack students take, they’ll find a harbor to welcome them with open arms.
“I’ve got ties to the aviation world outside of school, and one of the things that I recognized is that there’s an incredible deficiency in the aviation industry,” says Greenberger. That deficiency is across the board—“it’s pilots, it’s maintenance people, it’s avionics technicians [and] it’s air traffic controllers,” he says.
The reasons for that deficiency are simple, he says—there aren’t enough programs out there introducing young students to the aviation world.
That’s a problem that WASA is trying to remedy.
“This is the pipeline for the next generation of that industry,” Greenberger says.
The aviation industry sees the value in the program, and has offered it a tremendous amount of support as it has worked to get off the ground.
The latest addition to the WASA hanger is a full-fledged simulator of a 737 cockpit. It was donated to the program by a retired aviation mechanic down Philadelphia way.
“He was very nice and donated this to us. He liked what we had going on,” says George Harrison, a freshman with the WASA program. George was one of a group of students who went down to the warehouse it was stored in, disassembled it, picked it up and brought it back to the Wallenpaupack High School.
On the day of the River Reporter’s visit, students were hard at work reassembling the simulator, putting together all of the metal panels that will serve as the simulators shell.
Greenberger says the 737 simulator is another piece of the program that will help students and the airline industry both.
Right now, the airlines have an issue that students will get their pilots licenses flying smaller planes and then struggle to acclimate to the “500 buttons and knobs” that are involved with flying a 737, says Greenberger. “If we can expose our young people to that environment at a younger age, once they transition to the airlines and the airlines put them back in the simulator, they’re fine, because they already know that, they’re comfortable with it.”
Students agree—this would be a “gamechanger,” they say, for their experience in the aviation industry.
The aviation industry has been very generous not just with its resources but also with its time. Greenberger says he takes students out into the aviation community for networking and for experience, including to regional airports such as JFK and Stewart, and sets up networking opportunities with aviation professionals.
Cameron talks about a fundraiser at Cherry Ridge Airport the community and the airport put together for WASA this past summer, involving a car show, an air show and a 5K.
The next day, he says, he got to visit Mt. Pocono Airport courtesy of Hi-Tech Helicopters, which let him get some hands-on experience working with the tail of a helicopter and brought him up in one as well. “It was awesome; it was amazing,” Camron says.
“The aviation industry is extremely generous; they are very catering to us and they are very welcoming to these young folks,” says Greenberger. “It’s really, really something special. It’s really cool.”
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