Northwestern Michigan College (NMC) is officially underway on a major aviation hangar expansion, the college announced this week. Once complete, the new facility will increase NMC’s capacity to train pilots by 25-40 percent.

NMC has been talking about growing its aviation program since 2022. Speaking to The Ticker in March of that year, Alex Bloye, director of aviation at NMC, said the program was bursting at the seams with its existing capacity to serve approximately 125 students at any given time. With attrition and graduation, Bloye said, NMC aviation has typically been able to open about 50 seats to new students each academic year – far below the 125-150 applicants the program had been getting annually since 2017.

Earlier this year, the college received $3.75 million in grant funding from the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity “to renovate and expand NMC’s 47-year-old aviation hangar and purchase additional aircraft.” That grant required a financial match from NMC, and the college also received $550,000 in federal funding to put toward the project. The hangar expansion itself carries an estimated cost of $7 million.

According to a recent press release from NMC, the college’s current aviation hangar is 48 years old. Once renovated, the hangar will boast 40,000 square feet of space “and will feature state-off-the-art facilities.”

The groundbreaking ceremony for the new hangar (pictured) was held Monday, October 7 and involved not just NMC leadership and faculty, but also State Representatives Betsy Coffia and John Roth and United States Representative Jack Bergman.