Businessman Teams Up with NCCC to Offer Training Program for Pilots

Nov. 17—Niagara County Community College will announce plans Wednesday to begin offering a pilot training program at a planned new building at or near Niagara Falls International Airport.

Joseph E. Wolfson, a local pilot and businessman, plans to call the building the Niagara Falls Flight Academy.

NCCC President William J. Murabito said the college hopes to recruit more than 50 prospective pilots for associate degree or certificate programs, targeted to open in the fall of 2022.

They will go through normal academic courses at the college's main Sanborn campus and pilot training at Wolfson's building. Murabito said the cost of construction falls entirely on Wolfson, and students will have to pay an extra fee on top of their normal tuition.

The plan is to be officially announced in a news conference Wednesday afternoon on campus.

"We think it's a phenomenal opportunity for Western New York," Wolfson said in an interview. "For a community college, it's perfect. They do a lot of technical training."

Murabito said a potential second phase of the program could train aircraft mechanics as well as pilots.

Wolfson, the founder of the Metroteller banking machine system, said he's been working on this idea with NCCC since June 2019.

Murabito said Prior Aviation, the former fixed-based operator at Buffalo Niagara International Airport, had been working on a similar arrangement with Jamestown Community College, but the company dropped the program.

Prior's successor company was interested in a small program with about six students, "which would not be economically feasible," Murabito said.

"If we're going to have the ability to receive grants, and our students to receive grants, from large corporations such as airlines to help support the program, we need a bigger program," the NCCC president said.

"There's such a tremendous shortage of pilots these days," Wolfson said. "I have to raise capital investment. That's the big challenge."

His original plan was to acquire a 31-acre parcel adjacent to the airport and erect a 10,000-square-foot building, including a hangar and a flight training center. The site would have required the installation of a 700-foot taxiway to move planes from the Flight Academy hangar onto the airport runway.

The construction, plus land acquisition, would have cost "several million dollars," Wolfson said, and Air Force approval would have been needed.

However, at a recent meeting, Wolfson and top officials at the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority, which owns the airport, discussed whether an available building on airport property could be renovated as the Flight Academy site. But various options still are being explored, including the use of open land on the airport property.

NFTA spokeswoman Helen Tederous confirmed that authority officials have talked with Wolfson, but no deal has been made so far. Tederous said the NFTA would work with the Federal Aviation Administration on any necessary approvals.

Murabito said NCCC must obtain approvals from the state Education Department for the pilot training center, and from the SUNY system for the degree program.

The Flight Academy would be the second company working on aviation projects near the Niagara Falls airport. Stavatti Aerospace, which purchased a former National Guard site on Porter Road in the Town of Niagara, obtained tax incentives and low-cost state hydropower in 2020 to assist its plan to construct a plane factory.

"If they hit a home run, we're going to be right there," Murabito said.

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