In the school’s 55th year of aviation training, the sky is the limit for Mount Royal University’s (MRU) new Springbank Aviation Campus.
The campus will double the school’s pilot training intake from 40 to 80 students annually, addressing critical industry needs, according to an MRU-issued press release.
“This expansion, supported by the new facility, ensures more career-ready MRU graduates are prepared to enter and lead in the aviation sector,” the release reads.
Despite welcoming students since late August, Ian Wallace, Interim Chief Flight Instructor for the Aviation Department at MRU, called the October formal opening the campus’s hard launch. He said that the biggest advantage of the new facility will be the students’ experience.
“Before it was a good facility, and it worked well for us, but there’s limitations, and in some ways, we lacked the ability to innovate on training,” he said.
“Now we have the resources and the tools and the space to look to the future, to keep growing, to serve the industry, not just with pilots, but with all kinds of facets of the industry.”
The campus is located at the Springbank Airport (317 Noorduyn Park, Rocky View County), just west of Calgary, and houses amenities such as a virtual reality flight simulator, a crosswind flight simulator, a multi-screen general-purpose flight simulator, multiple aircraft hangars, multi-use kitchen and a staff lounge.
Students in programs like the Bachelor of Aviation Management and the Aviation Diploma will commute between the space and MRU’s main Calgary campus for additional flight sim use and other, non-aviation classes.
The school received various donations in developing the campus, including investments from the Government of Alberta ($7.1 million), Prairies Economic Development Canada ($3 million).
As it stands, the campus has a planned addition of two planes, a Cessna 172 and a Piper Seneca.
Wallace said that though some enroll having previous flight experience, all students partake in ground training before any physical flying starts.
“As you progress, you hit these milestones in tandem with the ground training, so you’re not doing all the ground training first, you’re not doing flight training first, which would be way too much too soon,” he said.
“It’s structured in a way where you can have the best of both worlds and so you’re looking at a few classes in a group setting, a few one on one with an instructor and then you go fly and then you come back to the classroom and you’re almost alternating between the flights, getting the hands on experience in the air and the simulators and good old fashioned classroom learning.”
