Despite budget cuts, flight school must continue to soar
It’s not every day the governor literally flies into town.
But that’s what happened this week when Phil Bredesen piloted a Diamond Star DA-40 into Murfreesboro Municipal Airport as part of Middle Tennessee State University’s new fleet.
The university’s aerospace students will be able to train with 25 new planes, including nine Diamond DA-20s for basic flight instruction; 11 DA-40s for instrument training; three Piper Arrows with retractable landing gear for advanced flight training; and three Piper Seminoles for multiengine training.
MTSU President Sidney McPhee believes the fleet makes the university department second only to the Air Force Academy for training young pilots.
And Bredesen, who has been a pilot since the 1960s, was especially exuberant since debt on the new planes will be paid through student fees instead of state taxes.
MTSU already has a Boeing 727 donated by FedEx a year ago being used for an aerospace maintenance laboratory. A relationship it has with Diamond Aircraft enabled it to forge an agreement for the new fleet.
Bredesen calls such arrangements vital to maintaining MTSU’s top-flight aerospace program when Tennessee is being forced to cut back higher education funding.