School of Aeronautical Science has new home!

Dear fellow alumni,

It is a great day at LeTourneau University as we celebrate that the School of Aeronautical Science will soon have a new home! President Lunsford announced today that LETU’s aviation program will move entirely from the Longview campus into a newly acquired 50,000-square-foot facility, formerly occupied by ARMS, at 200 Airpark Drive at the East Texas Regional Airport.

Check out the new facilities on YouTube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFXq3u21Q0k

The facility with renovations is expected to cost the university an estimated $6 million. The main building includes nearly 39,000 square feet with a 10,000-square-foot airplane hangar. Renovations will add classrooms, labs, offices and meeting spaces. Close to 50,000 square feet! AMAZING!!!! About 250 students and over 30 faculty and staff will move into facilities by fall of 2009.

From Fred L. Ritchey, our own dean of the School of Aeronautical Science: “This new facility will enable the school to add new programs to meet its goal of doubling student enrollment in the next ten years. It also will unite the school’s aviation program all at one location for the first time since the mid-1960s.”

Last year, the university added two concentrations in mission aviation and military aviation. This fall, the university will begin offering two new degree concentrations: flight management and flight marketing.

One of the new programs the university hopes to offer includes training for air traffic controllers. The school applied in March to the FAA to provide the FAA AT-CTI program. Final notification from the FAA is not expected until sometime in July. Currently, there is no AT-CTI school in the state of Texas.

We hope you will join us in thanking God for his continued blessing of our campus, our students, our faculty and our staff. You have an amazing heritage through LETU and we hope to see you on campus soon…perhaps to check out the new aviation facilities!