WESTFIELD – Officials of Westfield Public Schools and the Westfield Technical Academy gathered at the Hangar at Westfield Barnes Municipal Airport Tuesday to celebrate the news that the Aviation Maintenance Technology program has received Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) certification approval.
WPS Superintendent Stefan Czaporowski said that the program has passed the written curriculum and hands-on inspections.
“They told us that we accomplished the impossible,” Czaporowski said, gleaming.
AMT instructor Galen Wilson, who flew into the meeting with Ken Dromgold in his L3 WWII Army/Air Corps Aeronica, said that the program makes WTA the first FAA-certified high school in New England, and only the third in the country.
“All certification objectives have been met, with zero limiting factors,” Wilson said. The determination follows the all-day inspection on August 3 during which 136 demonstrations were evaluated. Wilson said the curriculum which the school had written and the syllabus they created have also been reviewed.
“We got through them all. When they departed, they said, ‘we see no problem with the curriculum, syllabus, program, equipment or tooling,”Wilson added.
Westfield’s city advancement officer Joe Mitchell, who also serves on the Aviation Advisory Committee, repeated the FAA’s quote of “You’ve accomplished the impossible,” with several people suggesting that it become a school motto.
“Never before have I worked with a group of individuals that were this productive. Once they set a goal, they executed it flawlessly,” Mitchell said. He said the whole program progressed from the back of a napkin to FAA-certification in two and a half years.
“Even though this was an entire team effort, none of this would have happened so quickly if it wasn’t under the leadership of Galen Wilson, a.k.a. Chief. He carried the whole thing,” said Dromgold, who chairs the Aviation Advisory Committee at the school.
Wilson comes from a thirty year career in the Air Force, where he was an A10 and F15 crew chief.
Wilson said the school will receive its formal certification or more precisely OpSpecs (Operational Specifications), which he explained as “what they issue us for how to run our school” at the FAA’s Bradley headquarters later this month.
He said this is a big deal for the FAA too, because they haven’t opened a school in over a decade.
