Eight percent of aircraft pilots in the U.S. are African-American. Less than six percent of pilots are females. That’s against the backdrop of a shortage of pilots that is expected to grow to 4500 by 2025.

New Cumberland based Pilots With a Purpose is a unique organization that it says “provides educational opportunities to expose young people to potential careers in aviation by increasing minority and female participation in aviation careers.”

With us on The Spark Wednesday were Ed Nielsen, co-founder of Pilots With a Purpose and Clyde Smith, a recent air traffic controller at Capital City Airport.

Nielsen was asked how Pilots With a Purpose got its start,"it came to be a long time ago, only I didn't realize it when I used to work with kids up on the hill and having been born on the Hill and graduated from in Harrisburg. Yeah. Was working with kids and a once in a blue moon, I would take them up for a flight. And it was a an enormous experience in terms of seeing a very different world than they thought when they're down the block in the hill. That led to fast forward now to about three years ago. I've been I've been a pilot for about 40 years, private pilot with an instrument rating. And I had a young man who was a cancer patient from Penn State Hospital and thought I'd take him up for a flight. He'd never been up before, wasn't sure what was going on. He was still in recovery big time. And I took this young man up and it was like an eye opener from 30 years ago when I was working with these other kids. And this young man not only seized the opportunity to get into aviation, but he actually is enrolled and graduating now from a school up in Williamsport on technology, aviation technology. And he now has told me he wants to get into possibly getting into an airline transport rating of some sort. So we'll see how it goes with him. But that was kind of a spark and it just happened in a conversation with my my co-founder colleague Susan Nailor Adams, who is the owner of Cargill Aeronautical Academy, which is where I fly. And we just took off with the idea, took us about a year to put the idea together in terms of what kind of organization."

Nielsen said the young man living with cancer is healthy and well on his way toward a career in aviation.

Nielsen had worked with kids in foster care or had been involved in the criminal justice system. He talked about the mindset a young person needs to pursue a career in aviation," You need to where know where you are right now. And then you need to know where you want to be. A lot of times in foster care with delinquent placements, the kids don't really have a plan. There's a short term plan in terms of behavior, But in terms of long term, where do I want to go and how do I want to build on my experiences? Bad as they may have been to be a better person and a better employee, as it were. So those kind of things come together. I think they're crystal clear. You have to do it in an airplane. I need to know where I was, where I am right now, and where I'm going. Clyde is going to be monitoring the same stuff. So a student that has that capacity to overcome the emotional side of things and trauma that they've experienced and has a sense of those three perspectives, if you will. That's what we look for."

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