'License to learn.' How SLO County is preparing for an aviation industry boom

Cristian Plasencia used to dream of a career in forensics - but that all changed when he took a field trip to ACI Jet in San Luis Obispo in high school and saw a plane up close for the first time.

“Before that, I’d never been 20 feet from an airplane,” he said. “And seeing all that, seeing the kind of work they were doing and the facility, I just thought it was super, super cool.”

During that visit, Plasencia learned about a new aviation mechanics program that was slated to start at Cuesta College in the coming years. After graduating from high school in 2022, he enrolled at Cuesta and took general engineering courses for one semester - but he hadn’t heard anything more about the aviation pathway.

“When I was signing up for classes with my counselor, we had finished out all my plan of like what I was going to take, what years, what semesters, and we had ended,” Plasencia recalled. “And I was like, ‘You know what? Have you heard anything about that aircraft mechanic class that was opening up?’”

The counselor responded that the course was starting in January of that school year - and Plasencia responded by scrapping the entire education plan they had just created in favor of the new program.

“Pretty much, I just told him, ‘Scratch that,’” he said. “’I think that’s what I want to do.’”

Three years later, Plasencia now works full-time as an aircraft maintenance technician for Loyd’s Aviation, the fixed-base operator at the Paso Robles Municipal Airport. He spends his workdays diagnosing and fixing mechanical problems on the planes that come into the shop - the exact work he aspired to do after his first visit to ACI Jet.

Plasencia described the education he received through Cuesta’s aviation maintenance courses - and his subsequent Federal Aviation Administration certification - as a “license to learn.”

He’s currently enrolled in a bachelor’s program to obtain a degree in aviation maintenance management and has dreams of someday opening up his own operation.

For now, Plasencia considers himself lucky to have been able to get a job in his chosen field in SLO County right out of community college - but stories like his may become more common as the city of Paso Robles’ plans to establish a spaceport with a focus on horizontal launches at the airport, as well as an industrial expansion in the nearby aerospace and tech corridor.

Those plans are likely to open up even more opportunities for local graduates in the aerospace and aviation sector who aspire to put down roots in SLO County.

“That’s a huge opportunity for anyone in the area really,” Plasencia said.

SLO County's aviation industry is growing. Where is the workforce?

The aerospace sector in San Luis Obispo County has a lot of room for growth - and higher education institutions have taken notice.

Cuesta College’s focus on aviation started in 2018, when ACI Jet reached out about the need for trained aviation maintenance technicians in SLO County.

“They helped us - specifically Bill Borgsmiller, the CEO down there - helped us understand the workforce needs and the shortage of aviation maintenance technicians that was on the horizon, both due to retirements and just the growth in the industry, and that technician training programs weren’t keeping up,” Jason Curtis, vice president of instruction at Cuesta College, told The Tribune.

By 2021, the college fully committed to launching an aviation mechanics program - with the goal of helping students find well-paying jobs after college and helping local industry leaders hire a well-trained workforce.

Students who complete the Cuesta program receive a certificate that allows them to sit for the FAA’s written and practical skills tests to become a licensed airframe and powerplant mechanic, Curtis said. The airframe rating judges a person’s knowledge of the exterior frame of a plane, while the powerplant rating pertains to the engine.

Starting this year, the students who complete the program along with general education courses will also receive an associate’s degree in aviation maintenance, Curtis said.

“The associate’s degree doesn’t really do anything for the students as far as career preparation,” he said. “The FAA certificate is the gold standard, but it does allow the students to go on and get a bachelor’s degree, maybe in management, if they want to work their way up to become a shop supervisor or something like that in the future.”

He added that graduates with associate’s degrees can return to teach in the program at Cuesta after they’ve gained at least six years of experience - a further attempt to shore up Cuesta’s own workforce.

Curtis added that graduates from the program have gone on to work for local outfits like Loyd’s Aviation and ACI Jet, but he also emphasized that aviation mechanics are in demand in other industries.

“They’re sort of considered the best mechanics out there,” he said.

And Cuesta isn’t stopping with its aviation mechanics program - it’s instead looking to the future of the aviation industry to anticipate workforce needs and ensure that SLO County students can be at the forefront of local demand.

In the coming years, the college plans to develop a drone curriculum that can be employed at local high schools as a gateway to the aviation industry.

It is also partnering with Santa Cruz-based company Joby Aviation to develop a potential training curriculum focused on electric aircraft, or eVTOLs, which Curtis said are up-and-coming aircraft, especially on California’s Central Coast.

“If the eVTOLs become a thing, then what’s it going to take to work on and maintain those aircraft?” he said. “If you and I are taking an air taxi from SLO up to Paso like an Uber - a little electric aircraft - you know, who is there to check that aircraft when it goes back to its home base and makes sure that it’s charged up and everything’s functioning properly?”

Cuesta is also working on developing an “avionics” certification, which Curtis said would be a way for students to get involved in aircraft maintenance without a full mechanics license.

“All these modern aircraft have GPS systems and satellite radio and satellite internet and all sorts of things, and there’s a need for technicians who can work on those systems that don’t have to be working on the body of the aircraft or the propellers or the jet engines,” he said. “So we developed a new certificate to train students to work on those components as well.”

Aviation programs like Cuesta’s are coming at the right time for an industry facing an aging workforce and a lack of experienced technicians, Loyd’s Aviation president Ryan Crowl told The Tribune.

“The average age is well into the mid-50s for an aircraft mechanic,” he said. “And regardless of what aircraft the future holds - they could be unmanned, they could be electric, they could be something we haven’t thought about - they’re going to need technicians.”

Loyd’s has hired two graduates, including Plasencia, out of Cuesta’s program. Now its focus is getting those technicians experienced enough to progress through the industry and fill in the gaps in the workforce.

“We’re happy to have local folks that are in the area that are graduating and licensed, and then we can train them as they go,” he said.

Cal Poly plans for growth as Paso Robles seeks spaceport license

With the possibility of a SLO County spaceport on the horizon, Cal Poly is also exploring how it can collaborate with local partners to further training opportunities for students.

Students have already been making use of a micropropulsion test site and lab at the Paso Robles Airport, where aerospace engineering students and companies have studied lift-off mechanics and novel designs for aircraft and spacecraft, according to Karen Tillman, assistant vice president for the Office of Innovation, Industry and Economic Development at Cal Poly.

Cal Poly has also been a partner to the city in its efforts to establish a spaceport - and it has tentative plans to build a spaceport training and research center at the site if the city gets approval.

The university has so far received a grant to conduct a feasibility study into the plan, and is poised to receive another grant to begin scoping out the location and necessary equipment, Tillman told The Tribune.

That’s one of two potential new aviation training sites that could be built in SLO County.

Cuesta also recently received a grant, with Cal Poly listed as a sub-recipient, to examine the feasibility of putting a joint training facility at the SLO County Regional Airport to house Cuesta’s aviation maintenance and technology program alongside Cal Poly’s aerospace engineering program.

The idea is for the two institutions to operate their programs in close proximity to each other - in a way that would allow technical students to learn from the engineers and vice versa.

“Technicians can better understand sort of the theory and the philosophy about why things are designed and engineered, and the engineers can understand what the actual practical application is for the folks that are doing the technician component,” Tillman said.

“If we can build a combined facility - because both programs have separate facilities that are both tight - can we put the two programs together and actually make it one plus one equals four?” she continued.

Tillman said the research has so far found “really good potential” for a possible facility, but Curtis said nothing is set in stone yet.

“There’s nothing to report at this moment, but in the coming months, I think there will be some exciting news about Cal Poly and Cuesta working together to create a new aviation education facility,” Curtis told The Tribune.

Overall, Cal Poly hopes to position itself and its students at the forefront of the aviation industry - and to support other SLO County students in the process.

The growth seen at Vandenberg over the last decade, including the boom in the private aerospace sector, as well as the success of alumnus Victor Glover who recently piloted the Artemis II mission around the moon, has given the university insight into additional possibilities for not only its graduates, but the county’s local workforce as a whole.

Tillman defined the aerospace sector as one of SLO County’s “most important growth areas.”

“One of the really important things in all of this is how we’re looking at the full workforce,” she said. “Not just what comes from Cal Poly, but also what comes from Cuesta, such as what we’re doing down at the airport in San Luis Obispo.”

The city of Paso Robles roots for its local students

It’s these programs like at Cal Poly and Cuesta that Paso Robles hoped for when it strategized a local education pipeline that would provide young future engineers a clear pathway towards a successful future, Paso Robles economic development manager Paul Sloan told The Tribune.

“The idea is to create opportunities at all the various levels for people to be able to stay in the area through job creation and be able to earn a wage,” he said, “because we all know it’s a lovely place to stay, just having to make it such that people can afford it.”

The city’s spaceport and tech corridor projects are parallel paths, he said, where one cannot exist without the other.

“What sets our spaceport project apart from all other commercial spaceports is our focus on education,” he said. “We’re creating a pipeline through the educational systems at various levels into good paying local jobs here in the area.”

He continued: “At the same time, we are creating a talent pool that can attract businesses. We have people that live here already that they can hire to work in the companies, so it’s creating jobs through education as well as business attraction.”

More recently, the city has been working with students even younger than college - some of whom are in elementary schools.

Sloan said the seed could be planted in a school assembly with an astronaut or providing expanded CTE curriculum in middle and high schools.

“I think using the pipeline is a good thing because when we talk to people that are very successful in space and aerospace about their own journey, we will say, ‘Where did the spark come that you knew this was what you wanted to do?,’ and inevitably they say in elementary school or in middle school,” Sloan said. “So, when kids are at that age, they’re still dreaming of possibilities.

“I mean, we all watch Vandenberg things go up in the sky. We can build that pipeline to say, ‘Yeah, there’s a possible pathway.’”

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