Students AIM high in Manassas

About 150 students a year enroll in a local institute for classroom study and practical work

to learn how to make airplane travel as pleasurable and worry free as possible. They are not aspiring pilots, and they will not be offering drinks, snacks, pillows and blankets in flight. They are, instead, trainees enrolled in the Aviation Institute of Maintenance Manassas (a Washington, D.C. school), which opened in a shared hangar at the Manassas Municipal Airport in 2001 to train mechanics in the aviation field. It later moved to a Godwin Drive location.

The Aviation Institute of Maintenance (AIM) Manassas is one of 10 similar schools throughout the United States under the corporate umbrella of Technical Education Services Inc., owned by George Yagen, which has its headquarters in Virginia Beach. Yagen also owns Centura College, nine business schools in Virginia, and South Carolina, as well as an online distance learning division and Centura Institute in Florida, but aviation remains his passion.

Keith Zobel is the enthusiastic campus executive director of AIM Manassas. He went through training at the Virginia Beach location, where he met Yagen. Zobel worked in many departments in Virginia Beach including the financial department. In 2007, he was asked to manage the Manassas location. In 2010, the company moved to a facility vacated by a large consumer electronics company in Manassas giving AIM Manassas 33,900 square feet for its administrative offices, classrooms and hands-on lab space for students to hone their mechanical skills working on airplanes, engines, turbines, hydraulics and other aviation components.

“We provide a real opportunity for mechanically inclined people with the potential for growth,” Zobel said. “Flight travel is going to increase and there are a number of older mechanics who will retire and need to be replaced. Sixty thousand aviation mechanics will be hired over the next 10 years. They might work for Boeing, Airbus and at airports. Graduates can get into a career within one and half years of starting here.”

To enroll in the Manassas school, students must have a high school diploma; the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) requires the ability to speak, understand and read English. The school is accredited and overseen by the FAA, which requires a minimum of 1,900 hours of classroom and practical work. AIM requires 1,920 hours. The year is divided into 10- week quarters that are further broken down into lesson modules. There is a rolling enrollment so students can start classes at different times. Zobel said the cost of attending the Institute is about $13 an hour and financial assistance is available. AIM Manassas has an administrative staff of about a dozen and 16 to 20 instructors.

Read the full story in the Sept. 30 issue of the Bull Run Observer.