ORLANDO, Fla. — Three years after the first shutdown of the pandemic, Central Florida is seeing a booming return in tourism.

Orlando International Airport ranks as the nation’s 7th busiest airport, hosting more than 50 million passengers so far to date year-to-year.

More tourists mean more business for the region, and this includes airlines aggressively expanding service routes and hiring local crew members.

Texas-based Avelo Airlines has rapidly opened dozens of routes at airports in Orlando, Melbourne, and Daytona Beach.

Avelo, which already hosts a crew base and third-party training center in Orlando, is planning to open a new corporate training center in the area for their pilots and flight attendants.

“Oh, we have huge ideas for Orlando,” Michael Quiello, Vice President of Safety, Security, and Operational Effectiveness for Avelo Airlines. “Orlando has been very good to us.”

As airlines like Avelo look to expand service, there is a reality that it will take more people to keep the growing fleets of planes in the air and on the move.

Boeing predicts the aerospace industry will need more than two million workers in the next two decades, including:

• 899,000 new cabin crew members
• 610,000 new maintenance technicians
• 602,000 new pilots
• Source: Boeing Data

Quiello says developing a future workforce now is critical to communities like Orlando to ensure stability in growth in local economies.

“Every dollar that comes into Orlando may turn over 10, 15, 20 times…and think about those dollars coming in and how many times it turns over and that creates an unbelievable economy,” Quiello said.

While airlines throughout the industry continue to aggressively recruit new employees, Avelo specifically is looking at not just ready-to-hire recruits, but those who will be ready in the next decade.

Meeting the Need

It can be said it’s never too early to dream where you want to be later in life.

While students are often asked to look ahead, Mason LaCroix and his middle school classmates are being asked to look up.

“I’ve always been around airplanes, whenever I go to my grandpa’s house, we see planes flying by and I’ve always been into planes,” LaCroix said.

VIDEO: Future of Flight: Watch the story in the video player above to see the full story of the training program.

It's the kind of childhood dreaming Michael Quiello can relate to.

Like LaCroix now, Quiello grew up in the East Haven area of Connecticut. Quiello lived in a lower-middle-class Italian immigrant neighborhood.

“I remember telling my dad I want to be a pilot and he said people like us don’t become pilots,” Quiello said.

Undeterred, Quiello remained focused.

He's been flying for more than 53 years. He earned his private pilot’s license at 17 and soon found himself enlisted in the Marines. flying the A6.

Quiello left the service to begin a multi-decades-long career flying commercial airplanes, before serving as an executive for various airlines.

He's now with Avelo and helped launch the airline’s Aviation Career Exploration (ACE) program, in partnership with a middle school in East Haven, Connecticut.

As part of the six-month program, Avelo flew 35 students to Orlando recently, where they all had the opportunity to visit Avelo’s flight training center and fly a pair of $10 million flight simulators.

The purpose, Quiello explained, is to not only give back but to build a large pipeline of potential talent for the aerospace industry in the years to come.

Students were selected from 6th – 8th grades, with the idea that “…middle school students are young enough to adjust their academic and extracurricular choices to prepare them for an aerospace career,” the airline said.

The program started with a partnership of several groups in Connecticut, but Quiello and Avelo hope to expand and duplicate the program locally in Central Florida, to perhaps one day include students from across the Orlando region.

Inspiring students to consider careers, not just in the cockpit, but throughout the industry.

“We would love to roll this program out to other communities that would accept us,” Quiello said. “The Town of East Haven is very progressive because they saw a need. There’s an amount of students who don’t go to college or technical schools. There’s a need for experimental education to say something like flying airplanes or becoming a nurse or EMT.”

While the sky is the limit, so too for many students are the costs for advanced flight training.

Commercial airline pilot training can top $100,000.

“What we need to do as an industry is provide student loans to students,” Quiello said. “Loan programs don’t cover flight training, but if we can get student loan programs to cover flight training, it’s a great career path, and some airlines are supporting it in a smaller way.”

While upfront costs for training can be significant, airlines say so too are the benefits.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics found the median annual wage for airline pilots, copilots, and flight engineers was $202,000 in 2021 before new contract deals were reached between various pilot unions and airlines.

Despite the upfront costs, Quiello and Avelo say the payoff for the industry and communities like Central Florida that rely on aviation and tourism is too great to not invest early in.

“You change one person you can create a legacy, so the payoff for me, I get personal satisfaction seeing kids who six months ago didn’t know what the Air Force Academy was, didn’t know they could to speak to an astronaut and now they get the chance to ask questions, good questions,” Quiello said.