For the second time, Van Nuys Airport opened its hangar doors to high school students to teach them about the numerous careers and pathways in aviation through the Youth Leadership Airport Academy (YLAA).
The academy is an eight-week, four-session course for a cohort of more than two dozen students from schools across the San Fernando Valley. Alongside the airport, the YLAA is cosponsored by Los Angeles City Councilmember Imelda Padilla and the Youth Development Department (YDD).
Throughout the course, teens are taught all the ways they can work at an airport beyond just being a pilot. Jessica Yas Barker, the director of external affairs for Van Nuys Airport, said that most people who work at an airport take on other roles, such as community relations, engineering, and environmental scientists who test soil and air quality.
The first session, held on Saturday, March 14, was an introductory course in which the students were given a tour of the airport. They were shown around the facility, where they could see planes of different sizes – from single-engine Cessna planes to private jets and decommissioned World War II era planes to Super Scoopers used to combat wildfires.
The next three sessions will be held every other Saturday until April 18. Students will learn more about maintenance and repair operations; will visit a fixed-base operator, which is a commercial business that’s been granted the right by an airport authority to operate on the airport and provide aviation services; and get more details about aviation careers and pathways from people from college institutions like Glendale Community College and California State University, LA.
Programs like YLAA are important for the airport because not only is there a shortage of people working in the field of aviation, but it also exposes youth to the numerous different positions at an airport beyond being a pilot or mechanic that they wouldn’t have known otherwise.
“I didn’t know that the job that I sit in right now existed until I was 37 years old,” Barker said. “It would have been really nice to know about this job 20 years ago, because I probably would have gotten into aviation sooner.
“So that’s what we’re here to do, is to teach young people about the possibilities so that they can even consider it,” she continued. “They might also leave this program and decide that aviation is not for them, and that’s fine, but it’s important for them to be able to distinguish what does and doesn’t work for them. And aviation needs young talent.”
She added that a lot of people in charge of operations, from pilots to air traffic control tower personnel, are in their 50s and will be retiring in the next decade. So, cohorts like this group of students, she said, are key to the future of aviation.
The Next Generation
Two of those students are juniors, Aria Cahadbourne from St. Genevieve High School and Allison Escobar from Granada Hills Charter High School. Cahadbourne is an aspiring pilot who heard about the YLAA from an admissions officer, while Escobar, who serves the LA City Council as a representative for Council District 7, learned about it through a partnership with the YDD.
Cahadbourne, who has many family members who work in the aviation industry, began to pursue her goal of becoming a pilot after taking a discovery flight – an introductory, hands-on lesson piloting a small aircraft – in late 2024 and loving the experience. She’s already undergoing flight training through the Fly Compton Foundation.
“Being a pilot is really my dream,” Cahadbourne said. “I want to travel, I want to meet people, I want to experience new things, and being a pilot allows that.”
Escobar, on the other hand, is more interested in pursuing public relations and showing why the Van Nuys Airport is so important to the community. She wants to help guide other youth who may be interested in aviation but feel they don’t have the resources to pursue that pathway.
“And working in City Council, I’ve seen how oftentimes people are not able to differentiate between necessities and stuff that is actually feasible for your representatives to do,” Escobar said. “Working in the airport would help guide me in a way where I can use my skills in marketing and … use those resources to help build an understanding with the Van Nuys community to understand why this airport is so important.”
The Aviation industry is a male-dominated field. An analysis by the International Air Transport Association found that only about 10% of active pilot licenses in the United States were held by women in 2023, and the disparity is even greater when it comes to repair staff (6%) and aircraft mechanics (3%).
It’s a stereotype that both Cahadbourne and Escobar want to overcome.
“That’s why we need to have people stepping up to take these roles and taking these initiatives,” Escobar said. “I feel like, as a young leader, … whatever it is that I do, I always try to center it around actively pushing up communities instead of pushing others down.”
“There’s lots of stigma and stereotypes around women and aviation, but I find that’s definitely a main motivator for me,” said Cahadbourne, who would be the first female pilot in her family. “I want young women to feel like they’re capable of doing so much more than the beliefs that have been pushed down on them, … especially in the time that we’re in right now politically, when so much is happening and a lot of minority voices are being shushed, shamed and condemned.”