Fresh off a ribbon-cutting ceremony this week for Northwestern Michigan College’s newly-expanded aviation hangar, the college has announced that the aviation program is enjoying a 66 percent uptick in student enrollment this fall.

NMC has had lengthy waitlists for its aviation program for years, but was unable to grow the program substantially due to constraints on space and aircraft. Recent expansions to both NMC’s hangar space and aviation fleet removed some of those constraints, allowing the program to grow.

The Ticker broke the news all the way back in 2022 that NMC was eyeing ways to expand its aviation program. At the time, Alex Bloye, the department’s director and academic chair, said that the program had the capacity to serve approximately 125 students at any given time, with graduation and attrition typically opening about 50 seats to new students each academic year.

The problem was that demand was outpacing those numbers: Since 2017, NMC Aviation had been receiving 125-150 applicants every year. Without the ability to accept more than a fraction of those applicants, the department had a waitlist 100 names deep, with students waiting “up to a year to enter the program,” per Bloye.

In February of this year, NMC finally broke ground on a major expansion of its aviation hangar, touting the potential to “boost our capacity to train future pilots by up to 40 percent.” The expansion grew the 17,000-square-foot hangar by an extra 16,500 feet, and allowed the college to add eight new planes to its fleet. This past Monday, NMC held the official ribbon-cutting for the now-completed facility, which boasts 33,500 square feet of space and 19 total aircraft.

Completing the facility in time for the fall semester allowed NMC to admit 50 new students to the program this fall alone, a reported 66 percent increase over its typical fall enrollment.