Sixteen students walked into the old passenger terminal at Columbia Regional Airport this week — not to catch a flight, but to start training to fly one. Moberly Area Community College’s new Aviation Commercial Pilot program held its first classes there Monday, the same week the college wrapped up a renovation of the airport’s long-underused former terminal building into classrooms, a simulator bay, and faculty offices.
MACC has put more than $350,000 into the space since first leasing roughly 1,900 square feet there, later adding another 1,057 square feet as the program grew. The two-year Associate of Applied Science degree is FAA Part 141 certified — a designation that lets the college run a more structured, accelerated curriculum than the FAA’s standard pilot-training path. Students train in four-seat Piper Archer aircraft equipped with instrument-flight avionics through MACC’s partnership with ATD Flight Systems, and the new building gives them an FAA-approved Advanced Aviation Training Device plus a Redbird flight simulator for ground practice before they’re airborne.
Program Director Ed Longoria frames the push behind it plainly: the industry is short on pilots, and getting shorter. He puts this year’s shortage at roughly 24,000 pilots nationally, with Boeing projecting the industry will need 660,000 more worldwide over the next two decades. Airport Manager Michael Parks called reopening the terminal “an absolute fantastic opportunity” to put a mostly empty building back to work. ABC 17 News has the full story, and KBIA’s reporting on the inaugural class adds more on how the program came together.
For readers out this way, two things are worth knowing. First, this is a genuine local jobs pipeline — a national pilot shortage this severe means graduates of a two-year program have real odds of walking straight into work. Second, the program’s general-education coursework can reportedly be completed online or at any MACC campus, so a Howard or Cooper County student wouldn’t necessarily have to relocate to Moberly to start toward the degree — only the flight-specific training happens at Columbia Regional.
It’s a small story in the scheme of things — sixteen students and a renovated terminal — but it’s the kind of quiet local investment that’s easy to miss if you’re not looking for it. The old terminal at Columbia Regional sat mostly empty for years; now it has faculty, students, and a simulator running most weekdays.