WINDSOR
As a child, Aiden Rowe followed his well-traveled family through countless airports, to the cumulative effect of cultivating an affinity for aviation — though he lacked any specific focus beyond the certainty that he had absolutely no interest in becoming a pilot.
But during a seventh-grade career research project, he discovered a flight-adjacent interest: air traffic control. The concept had instant appeal for the way it lined up with one of his strengths — multitasking — and offered the dual enticements of providing a public service while solving a pressurized, ever-evolving riddle.
“That was something that appealed to me, when it might be a major red flag for others with the high stakes, the mind puzzle aspect of it,” Rowe says. “It was perfect. It’s like the golden egg.”
Today, the 20-year-old from Cañon City stands to end the semester as the first student at Aims Community College to graduate from a newly enhanced air traffic control program. The Federal Aviation Administration recently approved a beefed-up curriculum designed to fast-track candidates into a job so in-demand that the agency estimates it will fill nearly 7,000 positions over the next three years.
Already, Aims was one of only about 30 schools across the country offering an approved basic air traffic curriculum (Metropolitan State University of Denver also offers one within its aviation and aerospace department). But now, Aims’ Windsor campus has also become part of the first wave of institutions cleared to offer the enhanced training that allows graduates to skip the traditional course at the FAA Academy in Oklahoma City and move directly to airport tower or en route facilities for the final phase of training.
On the air traffic side, the program helps address a national hiring crisis. On the student side, it offers a cost-effective pathway toward a well-paying career. A two-year associate degree figures to cost from about $13,000 to $17,000 in tuition for in-state students — including lab fees to access the high-tech simulators — to qualify for a job that offers starting annual pay of more than $50,000 as a trainee to an industry median of more than $144,000, according to 2024 Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
Despite the demand and the potential return on the education investment, the career option remains “kind of a mystery” to a lot of people, says Patti Phillips, a retired 30-year air traffic controller and faculty lead of the Aims program.
“I’ve had a lot of people call me up and say, ‘I didn’t even know this program existed,’” she says.
LEFT: Student Michael Ritter uses a remote pilot operator simulating air traffic movement inside the Tower Lab. RIGHT: Inside the Radar Lab, Aiden Rowe, center, receives feedback from two of his instructors, Daniel Rogers and Ryan Hans. (Kathryn Scott, Special to The Colorado Sun)(Kathryn Scott, Special to The Colorado Sun)
Aims has about 37 students enrolled in its standard program that would top out at 50 due to the limitations of the equipment for lab classes. Phillips says she’s working with the FAA to procure waivers for about eight current students to be grandfathered into the enhanced program, so they can finish the curriculum and proceed directly to the next phase of their training.
In two years at Aims, Rowe has taken about 47 credits of aviation coursework toward the total degree requirement of 65. He crossed off other credits while in high school in Cañon City, where concurrent enrollment classes at a local community college allowed him to get a head start.
Once the semester ends in May, Rowe will take the FAA’s performance assessments — “three of our scenarios that are basically like skill checks” — and then move on to complete physicals, drug screenings and background checks.
“And once all of that goes smoothly,” he says, “then it’s into a job and into an air traffic center.”
Students who want to pursue the enhanced program must attain a “well qualified” score on the Air Traffic Skills Assessment test. If they fall short on that test, they can still complete the standard program and try to attend the academy. But with limited capacity in Oklahoma City, those students might still have to wait for a spot.
One question Phillips has encountered, often from parents of prospective students, since the addition of the enhanced program is whether the shortcut might shortchange students — and air traffic safety — compared to the longtime standard of attending the FAA Academy.
“It’s a fantastic question, and I’m glad that people are asking it,” she says. “And the answer is, emphatically, they are not missing anything by not going to the academy, because the (FAA) requirements say we have to teach exactly what they teach.”
FAA opened hiring floodgates
In 1982, shortly after President Ronald Reagan fired more than 11,000 striking air traffic controllers, Phillips was working on her bachelor’s degree in aviation management at what then was called Metropolitan State College in Denver. When the FAA “pretty much opened the flood gates for applicants” in the wake of the firings, Phillips says, she took a Civil Service exam that demanded some aviation knowledge but wasn’t geared entirely toward air traffic control.
Her performance on the test earned her a training slot at the FAA Academy. She went on to work 30 years as an air traffic controller at the en route facility in Longmont, guiding aircraft cruising at high altitudes between their origins and destinations.
By the latter part of the 1980s, the aftermath of the strike sparked the idea of expanding the pipeline producing air traffic controllers to include colleges and universities. Prototypes began to appear in the early ’90s at five institutions, and the concept gained momentum over the ensuing decades.
When Aims Community College launched its associate degree program in 2009, the career path still channeled candidates through Oklahoma City. Training at one of those collegiate programs around the country would lead to a candidate taking the Air Traffic Skills Assessment, which then could lead to a training slot at the FAA Academy — though the academy’s limited capacity created a natural bottleneck in the process.
LEFT: Air traffic control students Kristen Smith and Ailise Dettlaff work with their instructors to manage local air traffic and ground air traffic using a tower simulator. RIGHT: Instructor Daniel Rogers points to simulated radar tracking of aircraft on a computer screen for one of his students. (Kathryn Scott, Special to The Colorado Sun)
Once offered a training slot, candidates must pass a background check, medical and drug screening as well as a basic psychological test before starting the monthslong program. Candidates with passing grades at the academy — more than 30% washed out of training in 2024 — then proceed to an actual air traffic control facility, where they receive up to four more years of training before becoming certified.
“So Oklahoma City is kind of like the screening process,” Phillips says.
A long-term projected shortage of controllers sent the FAA back to the colleges and universities for part of the solution, amid a steady stream of scheduled retirements and attrition.
In February of 2024, the FAA asked institutions already offering the standard Collegiate Training Initiative if they’d be interested in ramping up to an “enhanced” program that would essentially replicate the training in Oklahoma City — giving successful graduates the opportunity to head straight for an air traffic facility for the next phase of their training.
“So it really speeds the process up,” Phillips says. “It makes many more avenues for hiring, not just the academy. It’s like everybody cooperating together to address this critical shortage of air traffic controllers.”
Beefing up simulations
Aims’ curriculum already met many of the new requirements for the enhanced program. It had the radar labs required to run training scenarios, both on the tower side, which controls airspace at and around airports, and the en route side, which handles air traffic between origins and destinations. But the school needed to write the specific simulations offered at the academy and compile documentation confirming that its new offering aligned with Oklahoma City.
For the eight instructors in the school’s program, preparing for the enhanced version proved an intensive process that took more than a year, Phillips says. The FAA sent a team to Aims to certify the program in January.
In early March, the FAA publicly announced that Aims had been cleared to implement the Enhanced Air Traffic – Collegiate Training Initiative (E-CTI). Aims became just the 11th institution in the country to enter the program, and the first in Colorado. (Metropolitan State University of Denver currently offers the standard program.)
The ramped-up attention to hiring has roots in a number of issues dating back to 2013 — and even earlier, according to a report by an independent National Airspace Safety Review Team. (The “open floodgates” at the time Phillips signed on in the early ’80s led to a wave of retirements in 2005-07.) For more than a decade, the politics of gridlock and inadequate funding slowed the FAA’s plans to expand the workforce. Budget cuts in 2013 led to an extended hiring freeze, and when the pipeline seemed poised to recover in 2019, a government shutdown for 35 days delayed hiring — only to be followed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The FAA’s 2025 workforce plan anticipated hiring 8,900 trainees through 2028. It exceeded its hiring goal of 2,000 in 2025 and hopes to add 2,200, 2,300 and 2,400 air traffic controllers in the next three fiscal years — in part through its efforts to streamline the hiring process and boost starting salaries by nearly 30%.
But the hiring blitz also comes with its challenges. The FAA plan estimates total attrition of 6,872 controllers through 2028, including academy and training failures that are expected to rise with the influx of candidates. Retirements, which had declined from a high-water mark in 2007, are expected to slowly increase.
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