Students in LCPS’s Ace Academy summer learning program are introduced to a fighter jet by Scottie Hauber, an Air Force veterans and ‘maintainer’ at Draken International, a ‘Top Gun’-style operation whose fighter jets, pilots and support crews based at the N.C. Global TransPark provide adversary training for military pilots in the region.

If most of what they knew about aviation was that airplanes fly and that pilots fly them, the middle and high school students enrolled in LCPS’s Ace Academy sharpened that 10,000-foot perspective considerably last week.

“I wanted to learn more about aviation and airplanes,” Hector Mendez, a rising sophomore at Lenoir County Early College High School, said. He and the 20 or so students got their wish through a series of aviation adventures that exposed them to the principles of flight and to the myriad occupations involved in keeping airplanes in the air.

Ace Academy is one of 15 sessions offered this month as part of LCPS’s Career Accelerator summer learning program, designed to give students a close-up view of a range of occupations and artistic pursuits. Career Accelerator itself is one of four learning programs LCPS is offering this summer to help K-12 students prepare for the coming school year.

On field trips to the N.C. Global TransPark, Ace Academy students visited FlyExclusive, the charter operation headquartered in Kinston that operates nationwide and employees hundreds of technicians locally, and to Draken International, a “Top Gun”-style operation whose fighter jets, pilots and support crews provide adversary training for military pilots from Seymour Johnson Air Force Base, Cherry Point Marine Corps Air Station and elsewhere on the East Coast.

They tried their hand at flying and programming drones and got instruction from experts at N.C. Department of Transportation.

“I didn’t know we were going to fly drones, but that was good surprise,” Hector said. “I really like flying them manually, but coding them was really fun because you had to use trial and error and see what really worked.”

At Draken International, on a tour led by 22-year Air Force veteran and Draken “maintainer” Scottie Hauber, the students got a close-up look at the A-4 Skyhawk and the F-1 Mirage, fighter jets the company’s pilots fly in air-to-air training exercises with military pilots. They also heard about the work that Hauber and others at Draken do outside the cockpit to keep those planes flying.

“I think it’s just really cool for our kids to see something in Kinston that helps our military that the average citizen would never know about,” said Nichole Hathaway, an LCPS assistant principal who is the Career Accelerator administer. “If you’re interested in the military, here are career options after your military experience or if you want to work on airplanes you can do that even as a civilian.”

At FlyExclusive, Hathaway said, “We got to see how the strip the airplane, paint the airplane, replace things within the airplane. We talked to them about how they go about getting those jobs – being an apprentice when you get out of high school or going to college and taking Lenoir Community College’s aviation program.”

Malia Bryant, a rising eighth grader at Contentnea-Savannah K-8 School, was paying attention. “I think I could probably do the apprenticeship they have at FlyExclusive,” she said later. “That was cool because you can do that from when you’re 18.”