By NICK STEWART
With a growing global emphasis on the use of flight in mining exploration and industrial development, Canadore College’s aircraft maintenance technician (AMT) program is busier than ever.
“Our graduates get scooped up all over the place,” says Darrin Caron, dean, trades and technology.
“There was a bit of a downturn in the industry after 9/11, but that has since disappeared, and this year in particular, our phone hasn’t stopped ringing. The demand is definitely outstripping the supply.”
As part of the school’s 83,000-square-foot aviation campus at North Bay’s Jack Garland Airport, the two-year AMT program prepares students for life as an aircraft mechanic. While the school also offers separate programs for maintenance of the structure and the electronic components of an aircraft, the AMT program incorporates elements of the two. This allows students to put their hands to a variety of systems, from landing gear to engines to navigation and communications systems.
As a result graduates are not restricted to the maintenance of a single type of aircraft, and instead have the ability to work on anything from helicopters, large passenger planes to small Cessnas.
With various aviation firms in the region, graduates are given ample opportunity to find work locally, though Caron says much of the program’s appeal is the ability to work anywhere in the world.
“For young people, it’s quite appealing to know that you really can make of the industry what you want. If you want to stay in North Bay, we have Voyageur, Bombardier, Air Canada Jazz, Gateway Helicopters. If not, the world is your oyster, and you can go all over.”
The AMT program is heavily regulated by Transport Canada, which allows graduates to reduce their 48-month apprenticeship by 19 months provided they’ve missed no more than five per cent of their classes. The school’s avionics maintenance and aircraft structure repair programs are similarly certified, making Canadore one of the only schools in Canada to have three full programs with this level of regulation.
“In all my 24 years in the college system, I’ve never been in a program that’s as heavily regulated by Transport Canada. We’re audited on a regular basis, because you’re talking about people’s lives. As opposed to the automotive sector, where a bad job might cause someone to get hurt, in aviation people rarely survive if a plane goes down. They really watch everything we do, and it’s good for the industry.”
Students see an average of 33 hours of class time per week, with the academic year stretch from mid-August to early May. Caron says these longer hours are made easier to swallow by balancing classroom theory with ample time in the school’s shops and hangars where students can apply their newfound knowledge.
Instructors are all licensed mechanics, most of whom return to the industry during the summer months.
Caron says this helps to distinguish it from offerings in other countries such as China, where theory often plays a much larger role to the detriment of practical experience.
This distinction has helped to create a partnership between Canadore’s AMT program and a Chinese educational facility. Formed four years ago, the project finds groups of students from Guangzhou Civil Aviation College studying at Canadore, with 20 joining the 140 Canadians already enrolled throughout the two-year program.
“The way it works in China is that they’ll have aeronautical engineers teaching the theory of flight to maintenance mechanics. I think they tend to over-teach, as they come at it from someone designs rather than someone who repairs and keeps the plane in the air. Here, the person who teaches you theory is the person who teaches you how to do it, and that makes all the difference.”
