Aviation Week’s Jeremy Kariuki speaks with Ralph Coppola, president and CEO of the Aerospace Education Program Alliance, about his efforts to bring together industry, education and government in the group’s mission to maintain and grow an in-demand aviation workforce.

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Jeremy Kariuki: Hello, and welcome to the BCA Podcast by Aviation Week. I'm your host, Jeremy Kariuki, associate editor for Business Aviation. This week we're speaking with Dr. Ralph Coppola, president and CEO of the Aerospace Education Program Alliance, about his organization's mission to consolidate efforts to maintain and expand the aviation workforce in the US. As a reminder, if you'd like to support the show please consider subscribing, following or rating us wherever you listen. Enjoy the show.

Okay. Today I am joined by Dr. Ralph Coppola, leader of the Aerospace Education Program Alliance Initiative. Ralph, thank you for joining me today.

Ralph Coppola: Thank you. It's great to be here with you.

Jeremy Kariuki: For those who don't already know, what is the Aerospace Education Program Alliance or the AEPA and how was it started?

Ralph Coppola: Well, the Aerospace Education Program Alliance is a membership organization for aerospace education programs at the K-12 level, the trade school level, and the higher education level. I was on the Youth in Aviation Job Task Force, and during the course of two years' worth of research on the workforce issue it became really clear that there wasn't an organization representing the interests of aerospace education programs across the board. There are organizations representing segments of that population, but not the whole population. We thought it was important to have an organization to represent the whole aerospace education population across the board.

One of the big problems we've had in education and in the industry in general is that we've been terribly siloed, and we need to break down those silos in order to be more effective. Our goal is to really represent the interests of aerospace education as they're trying to address the aerospace workforce issue. Education is the group that's actually building that workforce for industry, and so we need to work collaboratively across education to be able to do that effectively. That's why we established the AEPA.

Jeremy Kariuki: The AEPA recently sent a letter to Congress about a proposed aerospace workforce development program. How will this address the labor shortage in the industry?

Ralph Coppola: Well, actually the letter hasn't been sent yet. We're in the process of... We've got the letter drafted. We've been meeting with folks on Capitol Hill about the aerospace workforce development program. The idea is... The aerospace workforce development program was conceived to address critical current and future workforce shortages in commercial aviation and aerospace and defense. As you know, there have been issues with that over the last number of years. Just to give you a little bit of background, Congress mandated that Youth Access to Aviation Jobs in America Task Force, and the task force was mandated by Congress to develop a report with recommendations on how to address the aerospace aviation workforce. We spent two years researching how to do that, and the report was submitted to Congress in September of 2022.

One of the recommendations, recommendation 18, was for the establishment of an aerospace workforce development program. After doing the research, we saw that over the last couple of decades industry's invested a lot of money in education with the hope that that investment would result in building the aerospace workforce that industry needs both for commercial aviation and aerospace and defense. Well, unfortunately, with all of that investment the workforce problem has gotten worse rather than better. One of the things that became really clear was that while education needs money and resources, money alone is not going to solve the problem. What we really need is a process to be able to focus those resources on education programs that are actually addressing the workforce issue.

What we've seen is that there are some issues on both sides, on the industry side and on the education side. On the industry side, as I mentioned, industry's been investing money on education programs over the years, but many of the choices that they've made have been based on anecdotal and affective reasons for making those choices and they haven't always invested in programs that are actually getting people into the workforce. On the education side, education has really focused more on academic excellence than getting people into the workforce. What we've seen is there's been goal displacement with both groups, and what we're trying to do is get both groups to align their goals and their activities on the workforce activity, getting people into the workforce.

Education needs to... Well, academic excellence is very much like motherhood and apple pie. Who's going to argue with that? But, well, academic excellence alone doesn't always translate into getting people into the workforce, so while you may be focused on doing really well in teaching people how to do algebra or engineering or whatever the topic is, that alone doesn't necessarily mean that those students are going to go into the aerospace workforce. What we need to do is have education shift their goals from academic excellence, not abandoning that, but shift it so that the goal is really to get people into the workforce. We need to shift industry's goal to invest not in just any program that looks really cool, but in programs that are actually getting people into the workforce. In that way, we can bring industry and education together as partners to address the problem. When we do that, we have a much higher probability of really getting people into the workforce and addressing the problem that we're all trying to face.

Jeremy Kariuki: Wow. What kind of challenges have similar initiatives faced in this regard and how will the AEPA overcome those challenges?

Ralph Coppola: Well, some of the challenges have been that many of the attempts to address the workforce have been to focus on specific elements of it. You've got commercial aviation and you've got aerospace and defense. They generally don't talk to each other. The only company that really straddles both worlds is Boeing because they're in both camps, but most of the other companies are pretty separated. We've got significant siloing within the industry. We've talked with folks on the commercial aviation side, and some of the companies don't talk to each other. The people that work in those companies that are dealing with workforce don't talk to the other companies in commercial aviation. Aerospace and defense is a little bit more integrated than commercial aviation, but still they're siloed from education.

What's happened is that most of the students at the K-12 level are undifferentiated in terms of which track they're going to go into, if they want to go into aviation or aerospace and defense. We don't know whether they're going to go into commercial aviation, whether they want to be a pilot or aircraft maintenance technician, go into manufacturing or whether they want to be an engineer and work on defense systems or space projects. We don't know that, and so both groups are really trying to recruit students from that general population, K-12 level. They really need to work together to be able to do that effectively, otherwise we're doing this separately, we're duplicating effort, we're not being as effective. That's one big, big problem that we're trying to address, but the biggest problem is that we really need a process to be able to focus the resources where they're actually doing the job we want to see done. That's what this legislation is designed to address.

Jeremy Kariuki: When speaking about companies, I've read that you have a number of them that have already signed on to support this initiative. Are you at the freedom to tell me who those might be?

Ralph Coppola: We've got a letter together and we're in the process of disseminating the letter as widely as we can. A number of people have been helping us with that. We've been working with people in Washington State. There's a big aviation corridor there with the I-90 corridor, and most of the industry along that corridor signed on. We just had a Zoom call with the folks in Utah. We talked to folks from their G47 group and they're in the process of working through signing on to the letter, so just some examples of the kinds of organizations. G47 is their defense initiative group within the state. We're looking at those kinds of organizations, but we're just at the beginning stages of getting people to sign on to the letter.

The reason we're looking at a letter and getting people to sign on is that we've talked with about a quarter of the folks in the Senate offices and a number of the people in the House signed, both Republicans and Democrats. Generally, everybody likes the idea, but what the staffers in the offices have told us is that they want us to be able to socialize the idea with industry. What they mean by that is they want us to test the idea with folks in industry and get industry signed on. With that kind of support, we're more likely to get the legislation passed.

Jeremy Kariuki: Could you tell me more about the Youth Access to Aviation Jobs in America Task Force and how it informed the AEPA today? Furthermore, could you tell me what kind of results have been achieved in your work thus far?

Ralph Coppola: Okay. Well, let me start with the legislation because that's the critical piece that we're interested in chatting with you about. The legislation has two primary parts. What we're suggesting is that the first part is to modify the Department of Defense contract process so that contract process for aerospace and defense include the ability to have aerospace education programs as subcontract on those contracts. Let me use an example to illustrate what I mean. The Department of Defense regularly issues RFPs, requests for proposals, for companies to submit proposals for contracts to do a project that the Department of Defense wants. Let's say the Department of Defense wants a company to design and build an airplane for them, so let's say... I'm just using hypothetical illustrations here, so let's say a company like Boeing wants to submit a proposal to that RFP to get the contract to design and build that airplane.

Boeing doesn't have all the expertise that they need design the plane. For example, Boeing usually does not design the engines for the planes that they want to build so they would subcontract the engine work to a company like Pratt & Whitney or GE to do the engine work for that project. There would be many, many subcontracts like that on a large prime contract that a company like Boeing would be submitting a proposal form, and many of the other subcontractors would be companies with very specialized expertise to do different elements of the work for that large contract to build that plan. What we're suggesting is that education be an additional subcontract on one of those contracts. Education's job would not be necessarily to build or design that plane as the other subcontractors would be on for, but education's role would be to help build that workforce not specifically for that project of designing that plane, but for the nation in general.

The second part of the legislation would be the establishment of an aerospace education program list, and that would be housed on the DOD website. The list would list education programs at all levels. They could be for-profit, not-for-profit, they could be at the K-12 level, the trade school level, higher education level, but they all need to be focused on building the aerospace education workforce and the workforce for commercial aviation, aerospace and defense. We've established seven criteria that are measures for how they're contributing to the workforce, and the programs would enter data based on those seven criteria into this website. Those data would then be used to calculate where these programs rank in terms of their level of contribution to the workforce, and so companies would then be able to go to that website and identify the programs that are contributing the most to the workforce and then choose those programs to be included in their proposals for the Department of Defense as subcontractors. That's basically how it would work.

Jeremy Kariuki: That's incredible. That sounds like a wonderful idea. How soon do you expect to send this letter to Congress, and after that how soon do you hope for them to introduce the program to the floor?

Ralph Coppola: The letter's already drafted. We need to get companies to sign on. What we're doing is we're distributing the letter as broadly as we can. It's an electronic letter, so it's pretty easy to deal with. We have a Google link at the bottom of the letter. If an organization wants to sign on, all they have to do is click on the link, they fill out a simple form, and they're automatically sign on to the letter. We include their organizational name, it's organizations, not individuals, and so the organization would be attached to the letter. When we have enough organizations, we're going to submit the letter to Congress and the purpose is really we're at the point where we need to identify a sponsor on the Senate side and on the House side.

Let's say the sponsor's Republican senator. Then we would also look to get a Democratic member to be a co-sponsor. We do the same thing on the House. When we talked with the legislators, both parties indicated that they're not going to support any legislation that isn't bipartisan and so our goal is to really have a bipartisan, bicameral piece of legislation that's introduced both in the Senate and the House, that's bipartisan, so that we can work together to get this thing passed. The first step is to get the sponsors, then to get legislative texts, which we need, which would actually be the format of the legislation. Once that's done, we would take the legislative text and socialize that with other legislators on the Senate Armed Services Committee and the House Armed Services Committee, those are the relevant committees that we're dealing with, and get them on board. Then we would... After that's done, then we go to the broader House and Senate members to get as many of them on board with the legislation as possible. It would go through the NDAA, which is the Defense Appropriations Bill. We're hoping that we can do this for the 2025 year, but this is done every year so if it slides a year we're still okay.

Jeremy Kariuki: For our listeners who may be involved in businesses or organizations that want to be involved in this initiative, where can they go to get involved?

Ralph Coppola: Well, they can contact me directly. My email is [email protected] or they can call me on my cell, (703) 298-6630, or they can go to the AEPA website and reach me that way.

Jeremy Kariuki: All right, Dr. Ralph Coppola. Thank you, thank you, thank you so much for joining me today.

Ralph Coppola: Thank you.

Jeremy Kariuki: Thanks for listening to the BCA Podcast by Aviation Week Network. This week's episode was produced by Andrea Copley-Smith. If you enjoyed the show, don't forget to like or follow us on your podcast app of choice. If you'd like to support us, please leave a rating wherever you listen. Thanks again, and we'll see you next time.