SAN ANTONIO – The noise of an airplane engine filled the room as Jazzalaya Bethel, 16, pushed the throttle forward and pulled the back to take off.
But while she soared on the set of a computer screen, her feet remained firmly on the ground. It wasn’t a real flight or set of controls but a flight simulator parked outside the Ella Austin Community Center on the East Side.
The San Antonio Airport System’s mobile flight simulator was paid for by private donations and is now touted around the city, focusing on women and children from historically disadvantaged neighborhoods.
There are certainly jobs available. The federal government projects an average of about 18,000 job openings for commercial and airline pilots every year this decade, and a consulting firm estimates the pilot shortage in North America could peak in 2026 with 24,000 fewer pilots than will be in demand.
But pilots and flight engineers in the United States are currently overwhelmingly white and male.
Eric Warner, the special projects manager for the city’s Aviation Department, said the city wanted to see what it could do to help improve the number of women and people of color who become pilots by helping to spark an interest in the next generation.
“Well, just in general, a lot of times kids — especially in some, you know, neighborhoods in San Antonio — just haven’t gotten the experience, and they don’t have the access and opportunity to aviation that other kids do,” he told KSAT.
He said many of the children they see haven’t even been in a plane before, but they’re engaged and quick to catch on when instructed on the controls.
The simulator is just geared toward a basic introduction to aviation, but the hope is that their interest will take off.
“Just by doing this one time, we can connect them with other organizations throughout the city that can help them take it to the next level,” Warner said.
The target group Wednesday was the teenage participants of the West Care Texas summer program out of the Ella Austin Community Center.
Beverly Watts Davis, the board chairwoman of the center and the senior vice-president of West Care Texas, said many of the children in the free program could not have otherwise afforded to attend a summer camp. The program is an “extravaganza” meant to expose the kids to experiences they may not otherwise have been able to have, including the simulator.
“If they see it, they can believe it, and they can be it,” Watts Davis said.
She said a successful result from the simulator visit would be for a child to consider being a pilot and then figure out the choices they would need to make to get there, like completing their education. Even if they don’t end up as a pilot, “those decisions along the way are good decisions for any life.”
For Bethel, the experience in the simulator made her consider a different possibility from the career in cosmetology toward which she has been leaning.
“Since I did good, I might be a pilot,” she said. “It was kind of fun.”
After all, the sky is the limit.
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