Jessica Reed is a writer and editor with AIN. She joined the team in the fall of 2023 after two years covering the aviation industry at Avionics International. She earned her bachelor&#039;s degree in English (Writing &amp; Rhetoric) from Pepperdine University. Her hometown is St. Louis, Missouri, and she since has resided in Santa Barbara, California, and Brooklyn, New York, among others. She is currently based in Philadelphia.

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Jessica Reed

As business aviation grapples with a maintenance technician shortage, industry leaders at NATA’s recent Air Charter Summit delivered a sobering message: the days of being “passive beneficiaries” and waiting for skilled workers to simply appear are over. Meanwhile, embattled airports from Southern California to the Northeast face mounting pressure from local communities and operational challenges that could fundamentally reshape the nation’s aviation infrastructure.
The reality check came during an “Industry Townhall: Collaborating on Solutions and Leveraging Opportunities” session, during which NATA committee leaders outlined the challenges facing the industry and the collaborative approaches needed to address them.
While pilot shortages have dominated industry headlines, Phil Stearns, director of sales and marketing at Stevens Aerospace and Defense Systems and chair of NATA’s maintenance committee, painted a picture of an even more critical shortage: aircraft maintenance professionals (AMP).
“There are a lot of really wise gray-haired mechanics that are going to be retiring in the next one to five years,” Stearns told the audience. “Talking with the dean of Embry-Riddle and other schools, there are unfilled seats in the AMP classes. The amount of people coming into this business that are going to turn the wrenches on all these planes that you’re either operating, buying, or selling, or moving paperwork on…it’s not a one-for-one at this point. More people are leaving than coming in.”
The implications extend far beyond maintenance shops. “An inspection that might have taken four weeks before? Well, I’m short on technicians; now it’s going to take six or seven or eight, and where owners would tolerate a certain downtime, now they won’t tolerate that, which could turn into aircraft not selling anymore, and it’s just this weird cycle because somebody turning a wrench on the plane is no longer there or is in drastic short supply,” Stearns explained.
The problem isn’t a lack of opportunity—it’s a lack of awareness. When Stearns speaks with students about career aspirations, he consistently hears the same responses: “Thinking about going to the airlines. Thinking about going to the military.”
But when he mentions business aviation, “There’s that deer-in-the-headlights look for most of them. Realistically, they’re like, ‘I’m not really sure what that’s about. Tell me about that.’”
<h3>Breaking the Passive Approach</h3>
Stearns challenged industry professionals to abandon what he called being “passive beneficiaries of just letting somebody else do the heavy lifting in this area,” planning to poach people from other companies, “or waiting for the good people to come to us. Those days are basically gone.”
The solution requires active industry engagement at the grassroots level. “It’s up to all of us members and people that aren’t members to get this word out there,” Stearns emphasized. “Generally speaking, unless you’re AOG guys, you’re going to be home on the weekends. I mean, it’s a different lifestyle completely. The door to business aviation is wide open."
<h3>State-level Advocacy and Access Challenges</h3>
Greg Pecoraro, president and CEO of the National Association of State Aviation Officials (NASAO), outlined how state aviation agencies serve as allies for business aviation operators.
“We don’t get to interact with folks in the Europe part of the industry as often as we like,” Pecoraro noted, explaining NASAO’s role representing U.S. state aviation agencies that have collaborated since 1931. “They recognized that a patchwork of regulations across the country wasn’t going to work for something as mobile as aviation.”
Unlike the FAA’s singular focus on safety, state aviation agencies have a broader mission. “For state agencies, safety is their number one priority as well, but the other part of their mission is to promote aviation within,” Pecoraro explained. “State aviation agencies want to see a healthy aviation sector in your state that’s contributing not just economically but providing the transportation resources that the state needs to move goods and people and services.”
<h3>The California Airport Crisis</h3>
The town hall highlighted the ongoing struggles facing airports in high-pressure markets, particularly Southern California. Dondi Pangalangan with Clay Lacy Aviation at Van Nuys, who attended the summit, described the interconnected challenges facing the region’s aviation infrastructure.
“We’ve got five embattled airports, right? They’re all fighting their individual parochial fights,” Pangalangan said, describing how closure threats create domino effects. When Whiteman faces development pressure, “all that flight training that happens at Whiteman, which is only five miles away from Van Nuys, comes to Van Nuys because they can’t go to Torrance because of the onerous landing fees that are at Torrance.”
The concern extends beyond individual airports to the broader implications for advanced air mobility (AAM). “We lose one, it can have unintended consequences of losing the infrastructure that could be AAM for the future,” Pangalangan warned.
Pecoraro, drawing from his previous role protecting airports nationwide, offered perspective on the challenges: “One thing that’s sure about aviation is it continues to get cleaner and quieter. And that land that you think is valuable for some other purpose someday is going to be even more valuable to you than it is now for aviation, and I think the advent of advanced air mobility is really going to be part of that argument.”
<h3>Advanced Air Mobility Preparations</h3>
NASAO has taken a proactive approach to AAM through its multi-state collaborative, which has grown to include 36 states actively discussing regulatory frameworks and infrastructure requirements.
“We launched the AAM multi-state collaborative. We started with a few states that were very engaged in the issue, very interested, and we started talking about what does that look like from the state perspective, what states have to do to ensure that we’ve got the right regulations in place for land use issues in terms of citing individual freestanding vertiports as well as what we want to see happen at existing airports,” Pecoraro explained.
The group is preparing to publish four papers outlining state perspectives on AAM infrastructure and regulations. “We’re not calling them white papers,” he said. “This is just what the states think is the first step, what’s necessary, and we want to share that with the industry and with the FAA and other federal partners.”
<h3>Addressing Immediate Operational Challenges</h3>
Andrew Schmertz, CEO of Hopscotch Air and chair of NATA’s charter committee, opened the session by acknowledging the range of challenges facing operators: “We are being bombarded with a number of issues, some of which are perennial issues like workforce development. Some are newish issues like the ATC meltdown at Newark. I just read this morning from a report that traffic at Teterboro is down 22% this month.”
His message to attendees was clear: “When you think it’s a specific issue to just your company, bring it to our attention because it is almost certainly an issue industry-wide.”
<h3>Building Support Networks</h3>
NASAO has created an Airport Partners Program to better serve smaller general aviation (GA) airports that fall outside the scope of major airport associations. “When you talk about the GA airports around the country, a lot of the airports maybe some of you all are flying into, they’re not managed by folks that are part of [the American Association of Airport Executives],” Pecoraro noted.
The program provides these airports with “access to more resources, educational resources, and advocacy resources and information about the policies that are being handed down from the federal level.” Six hundred airports are already enrolled, and the initiative has a goal of 2,000 by the end of next year.

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