Winston-Salem’s Smith Reynolds Airport is about to become a place to go to explore a career in the growing unmanned aircraft industry.
AeroX, the nonprofit organization at Smith Reynolds building a traffic-management system for unmanned aircraft, recently joined with Piedmont Flight Training and Elizabeth City State University on a plan to help expose students to the industry.
Under the agreement, AeroX will host two paid interns from among students in the online version of the university’s aviation program. It’s the only four-year aviation science and unmanned aircraft systems degree in North Carolina.
Piedmont Flight Training will be ECSU’s flight school partner, training students at Smith Reynolds. Focus will be on flight education for students in the online ECSU program who are from Forsyth, Guilford, Randolph, Davie, Davidson, Rowan, Stanly, Union, Cabarrus and Mecklenburg counties.
ECSU’s online program will lead to the same four-year aviation degree offered in person at its eastern North Carolina campus. Students will complete the flight portion with Piedmont Flight Training.
Through the N.C. Promise Tuition Plan in place at four public universities in North Carolina, in-state students pay only $500 a semester in tuition.
The 10-year collaboration began in June and can be renewed in 2032, according to ECSU.
Last fall, AeroX received $5 million from the N.C. General Assembly to develop a traffic-management system for unmanned aircraft. The idea is to create a system that could be a national model for managing unmanned craft like the air traffic control system for planes with people on board. It’s part of connecting the state to an industry that Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS) projects to be worth $1.5 trillion a year by 2040.
“Workforce development is a focus for us,” AeroX President Basil Yap told the Triad Business Journal Wednesday.
The hope is to connect ECSU students with member organizations and others who may come to Winston-Salem as the industry develops, Yap added.
AeroX has two main roles in mind for the interns. One will involve outreach to youth camps with STEM components, accompanying craft from the fleet of drones AeroX has to share for education and demonstrations. Another role is supporting AeroX in its traffic-control development.
"Working with our vendors, working with our team that's helping design that and then build that. So that would be the role for them. The idea is really just to expose them to the industry.”
Many drone-related career paths are emerging, Yap added. There are pilots who have oversight of multiple drones from a command center, but governments at all levels are hiring as well, including the Federal Aviation Administration, Department of Defense and each service branch, as well as state agencies and federal agencies not normally associated with aviation.
“A lot of great work is being done there, from NASA to even the Department of Transportation, the Department of Interior. We're seeing it with combating wildfires, natural disaster response.”
