Hawaii Builds Homegrown Path To Solve State’s MRO Talent Shortage

Despite having a robust, inter-island aviation ecosystem, Hawaii has faced challenges finding and training enough talent to maintain its aircraft due to a shortage of local Part 147 schools and certified technicians.

Hawaiian Airlines and the Pearl Harbor Aviation Museum (PHAM) have now teamed up to build a homegrown program to remedy the situation.

Rojo Herrera, Aviation Pathways program director at PHAM, tells Aviation Week Network that many people do not realize how much Hawaii’s population relies on air travel. “We have people who work on one island that fly weekly and stay for a week doing certain jobs, and they’ll come back home on the weekends,” he says. “It’s not like we just have some international traffic—there’s a lot of inter-island traffic. We have a day-in, day-out, very robust requirement for people to support our inter-island travel.”

However, due to the state’s limited training infrastructure and industries, young people often relocate to the U.S. mainland due to more career opportunities.

“In the state of Hawaii, we have limited resources for training and development of pilots and mechanics,” says Jadyne Yomono, talent outreach program manager at Hawaiian Airlines. “We do a lot of recruitment across the nation, but we would love to be able to hire more talent locally and to see more of our local potential talent remain here. We always run the risk of talent not returning when they leave the state, so it’s really important for us to support programs throughout the state that are willing to uplift our communities and bring and retain talent here.”

PHAM was already working with youth to inspire passion for aviation through various exhibits, field trips and summer camps, but in 2019 it came together with stakeholders from Hawaiian Airlines, Hawaii Community College, the Department of Education, the FAA, the U.S. Civil Air Patrol and the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association to consider how the state could create better local opportunities for training.

PHAM first launched a Pilot Pathway program in 2023 to provide local opportunities for high school and college-aged students to obtain a private pilot license. The museum has now launched a two-year Airframe and Powerplant (A&P) Pathway program in partnership with Hawaiian Airlines that will prepare high school students to obtain their FAA A&P licenses.

Due to the state’s lack of Part 147 schools, PHAM and Hawaiian contacted West Maricopa Education Center (West-MEC), a technical school in Arizona that runs its own Part 147 program for high school students, to seek guidance.

According to Troy Gabaldon, West-MEC’s central campus administrator, the decision was made to launch the A&P Pathway program using West-MEC’s Part 147 certification and curriculum to simplify the process. “It’s like an extension of West-MEC in Hawaii,” he says, noting that his school will initially help Hawaiian and PHAM with the program’s launch. The aim is to set the program up to establish its own certification in a couple of years as it matures.

The first cohort of 12 students has started classes at the program’s facility in the Hawaii Civil Air Patrol building, which has been equipped with classrooms, lab space and storage, as well as a variety of training equipment, including a donated Beechcraft Travel Air and RV-12 light sport aircraft. Students will spend the first half of the day Mondays through Thursdays learning about aviation maintenance before going back to their regular high schools or distance learning programs to simultaneously earn their high school diplomas.

To help launch the program in its first year, Hawaiian Airlines is providing one of its own technical training instructors as PHAM builds its A&P teaching staff. Hawaiian and Alaska Airlines will also sponsor toolboxes for first-year students.

“As far as getting certification at the end of the second year, [students] will sit for their [FAA] oral and practical examination, just as if they’ve gone to a community college or to a school on the mainland to get their A&P,” says Herrera. “They could be 18 years old, starting a whole new life here in Hawaii with a ticket to work at Hawaiian or some other location. We feel like it’s a major shift in thinking for a lot of young people here who don’t want to be a pilot but who like fixing things.”

Herrera hopes to grow the program to a full class size of 20-24 students in its second cohort. He expects to replicate PHAM’s success with its Pilot Pathway program, particularly due to student opportunities to learn from Hawaiian Airlines professionals and to visit the airline’s facilities. “When our pilot cohorts go and see it there [Hawaiian Airlines facilities], they truly come back with a new vision of possible future life, and I just know it’s going to be the same—or probably even better—for our A&Ps,” he says.

“We’re excited about the opportunity to make investments here locally, in our backyard,” Yomono adds. “We have a good amount of employees who have relocated from the mainland and programs in place that provide a support network or a support group to help employees who are relocating from the mainland assimilate to the community here, but that still doesn’t replace the familiarity that a local community member who has grown up here, seeing and flying on Hawaiian Airlines planes, and who is now a mechanic here, has.

We are grateful for both pools of employees, but we are excited about the opportunity to grow our local pool.”