Frank Middleton’s passion for aviation spills into the classroom

EDITOR’S NOTE: Final installment of a 10-part series profiling non-traditional teachers at the Commodore Conyers College and Career Academy.

ALBANY — Retired Ob-Gyn Dr. Frank Middleton is a big believer in the Dougherty County School System. He graduated from Albany High School and all four of his children are Westover High School graduates. He was also the medical director at Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital for another “15 years or so.”

Now Middleton is the aviation instructor at the Commodore Conyers College and Career Academy (4CA). As with most of the other nontraditional instructors at the academy, there is a story behind Middleton’s journey to the new facility.

“Why am I here? I’m passionate about aviation; I’ve been flying airplanes for about 30 years and I am a flight instructor,” Middleton, who is also the chairman of the Albany-Dougherty Aviation Commission, said. “About three years ago I became aware of an impending pilot shortage.”

In response to that need, as well as the need for skilled employees in several other aviation-related fields, Middleton said the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association — which is one of the largest aviation organizations in the world — began developing an aviation STEM curriculum for high school students.

“Everybody’s been talking about it, saying, ‘What are we going to do about it?’” Middleton said of the growing shortage. “Well, the AOPA said, ‘We need to get people interested in aviation early on.’ So they set out to have this high school initiative. They wanted to get kids interested in aviation. Not just flying but engineering, air traffic control, avionics, mechanics, the whole thing. I got interested in that, and I went to their symposium in Tampa in 2015.”

That trip planted the seed for the aviation program at the 4C Academy.

“When I got back, I approached (then-DCSS superintendent) Butch Mosley. I told him this represents an opportunity for our community because the kids in our school system don’t have any role models in aviation. And that the AOPA was putting together a curriculum that we can use free. Mosely liked the idea, but we couldn’t figure out where we would put it.”

When the college and career academy concept was revived in 2016, Mosely called Middleton and said, “That’s where it needs to be.”

“I told him, ‘That’s great, let’s get the program,’ but then we found out there was no one to teach it,” Middleton said. “They asked me if I would do it and I said I’ll start it. But I’m not looking for a job, because I believe two things: No. 1, I think the concept of this academy is very important, the soft skills part is really important and that’s what makes this place different. No. 2 is I want to introduce aviation to these young people as a potential career.

“Whether it’s mechanics, air traffic control, whatever. If some of them get excited about it, I’ve done my job. It’s a long road, but there are a lot of long roads out there. That is basically why I’m here. I want to get this program off its feet and started.”

The AOPA curriculum is new. The organization has completed only a ninth-grade curriculum, and the 4C Academy has been selected as one of its beta test sites.

“I started looking at that and I continued to work with AOPA’s curriculum development. This past spring, the AOPA said, ‘We’ve got the ninth-grade year curriculum that we think is going to work, but we want to test it,’” Middleton said. “They allowed schools, anybody with a high school aviation program, to apply to be a beta test site for the curriculum, and we ended up being selected as one.”

Currently the 4CA has approximately 450 ninth- and 10-graders enrolled. Those students will select their career pathways in January. Middleton said he figured he’d have seven or eight students in his first class. That might be good because he has never taught in a classroom environment.

“I’m not an educator, as you know,” he said. “This is my first formal role as an educator. I’ve been flying for 30 years. I’m an instructor, technically. I do very little instructing, but I do have a certificate that I can instruct in airplanes, so that’s the only credential I have. I was excited about the concept here, but I thought I was retired.”