Not your typical classroom: Students further careers at 100th FAA Convention
One of the students is 16-year-old Daphne Cronk, who has been raising poultry since she was three years old.
'I am obsessed with them, and I've been collecting poultry. I am hatching geese, I am hatching ducks, I am getting a pond, I have over 30 chickens, so it's something I enjoy doing,' said Cronk.
Not your typical classroom: Students further careers at 100th FAA Convention
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Her day is unlike most of her classmates'; she wakes up around 5 a.m. and heads to her coop, where the 16-year-old, 'enough feed, enough water, make sure everything is clean because chickens have a tendency to get their feet infected…they're a little touch.'
In addition to her coop, Cronk is leading other students in her local FFA chapter while planning her future, which includes teaching and writing.
'I also want to do some journalism, and I will use that to do some agriculture advocacy so I can spread the word about how important agriculture education is and other topics I see in the ag industry,' said Cronk.
The topics she wants to cover aren't as soft as her chickens. One is how hard it is for farmers to make a living, stating that 40% of farmers have other jobs.
'If we want to have a sustainable ag system, we need to pay our producers enough to put food on our tables, without producers, we don't eat.'
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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The Hill
21 hours ago
- The Hill
They came here to bomb. They returned here to live.
Da Nang, Vietnam — Richard Brown hadn't planned on crying by the side of a Vietnamese road. He had come back to Da Nang, where he had once loaded bombs bound for targets across Vietnam, expecting anger, hatred, maybe even violence. Instead, during his first week back, a local motorbike driver grabbed his hand, looked him in the eye and said: 'I want to thank you and your country for sending so many boys here to come and die and help my country be free.' Then the man walked away, leaving Richard alone on the roadside to weep. 'I had one experience like this after another,' Richard told me, sitting near the old Chu Lai airbase where he had spent a year as a kid from Boston — 5'4″, 115 pounds, a former Hells Angels drug-runner trying to dodge jail by signing up with the Marines. On his first day in Vietnam during the war, he went drinking with some new friends. 'Then on the way back, someone pulls out a joint,' he said. 'And that's the last thing I remember until I got on the plane to come home.' He spent his tour as a 'bomb humper,' loading F-4s with napalm and rockets. 'We were more dangerous to ourselves than anything the Vietnamese could throw at us.' When the war ended, Richard went home, but nobody asked him about it. 'Nobody wanted to know what it was like.' He became an aircraft mechanic, an FAA supervisor, and then, decades later, found himself standing at the Vietnamese consulate window in California 'with fear in my heart,' he said. 'I figured I'd be rejected or yelled at… but I filled out the visa application with my shaky hand and stuck it through the window. For 25 bucks, I got it a week later.' My trip to Hanoi came just after Reunification Day, Vietnam's victory celebration in what is sometimes referred to as the American war of aggression. The red flags and old slogans were everywhere. A few people spoke of it almost apologetically, as if they pitied me for being reminded of my country's catastrophic defeat. Americans prefer our victories — Normandy, Desert Storm. The wars we lose, we bury. But for a few hundred men scattered from Hanoi to Da Nang to Ho Chi Minh City, burying it was not enough. So they came back. Da Nang makes sense for many of these men. It was often their first and last stop in Vietnam — the place they landed and flew out from. Tens of thousands of U.S. veterans have returned since the 1990s, mostly for short visits to see the places where they once fought. A few hundred stayed. Da Nang — once a major airbase, now a coastal city with condos, coffee shops, and pristine beaches — is consistently ranked among Vietnam's most livable cities. It holds symbolic weight: a hub for Agent Orange, for bombs and final goodbyes. Richard says he feels more at home here than he ever did in Boston. Over the years, he worked in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), where South Vietnamese treated him as a hero, but in Hanoi — consulting for Vietnam Airlines — his Marine past earned him some cold stares. 'When they found out I was a veteran, bombing the f— out of these people — needless to say, I got some cold receptions,' he said. It was a former North Vietnamese Air Force pilot who broke down those barriers. 'We weren't adversaries. We were just wearing different uniforms, taking orders from different a–holes,' he said. Gordy Thomas came back too. When he got home from the war in 1972, America was done with people like him. 'We learned not to talk about it,' he said. 'I got cancelled from everything because I'd fought in Vietnam. It's the same way people get cancelled now for supporting Trump. … It's that sense that you have no moral justification.' Decades later, long after getting his veteran's disability rating, he sold his house outside Nashville, cashed in his Delta miles and flew first class back to Da Nang — chasing cheap living, sunshine, and My Khe Beach (China Beach), where Marines once landed. Gordy says living here forced him to confront the 'moral injury' of war — the belief that an American life was worth more than a Vietnamese one. 'Coming here was the final healing point of my PTSD,' he told me. He now gives part of his pension to schools and poor families in his wife's hometown. 'So what it comes down to is the United States government, who sent me down here in the first place…now gives me enough money tax-free each month that I can take a very small amount and give it to the people here,' he said. 'It's very helpful to them and is appreciated.' Like Richard, Gordy never really knew the Vietnamese during the war — and like Richard, he met and married his Vietnamese wife here, only decades later. Matt Keenan's story is about unfinished business. He came to Vietnam in 1971 to help 'Vietnamize' the war. In 2014, back in New York, he got a cancer diagnosis tied to Agent Orange. 'I wasn't surprised,' he said. 'But I wanted to come back and see how the people who were exposed are living.' He found his purpose at the Da Nang Association for Victims of Agent Orange. He volunteers with disabled children, some born decades after the spraying stopped. 'They've become like my extended family,' he said. 'The beach is nice, but that's not my priority. I have a whole life in Vietnam.' He has attended solemn repatriation ceremonies for soldiers' remains. He even stood alongside President Biden during one, handing a former Vietnamese soldier back the diary he had lost 50 years before. Keenan, too, met and married his wife here. Before I left Hanoi, I visited the old Hoa Lo Prison — the 'Hanoi Hilton.' Its yellow walls once held Vietnamese revolutionaries under the French. The Vietnam War wing presents its own tidy version: photos of American POWs smiling, playing basketball, unwrapping care packages — a careful curation of the story. Not far away, in a modest home in west Hanoi, I met Ngo Ngọc Duong. Through a translator, he told me that he joined the North Vietnamese Army at 18 and fought for 16 years as a reconnaissance soldier — crawling into enemy zones for intelligence, surviving on roasted cassava in bamboo tubes. He described the day American helicopters hunted him through dense forest for miles as he dove into foxholes, crawled forward and ran again. 'They had aircraft, bombs, the most advanced weapons,' he said. 'But in the end … they couldn't kill me.' His daughter was born deaf and with intellectual disabilities, a legacy of Agent Orange. Still, he sees American soldiers, like himself, as victims of war. 'They didn't want to invade another country, but due to circumstances and orders, we ended up on opposite sides,' he said. 'On the battlefield, we were enemies — but outside of war, they are just people like us, with families, dreams, and their own pain.' That's why, even today — after all the loss and suffering — he warmly welcomes American veterans back. He hopes to shake hands with them, to talk, to be friends, and most importantly, to send a message: 'Cherish life. Cherish peace.' All four men grew emotional while telling their stories. The three Americans arrived with bombs overhead and rifles in their hands — or bombs strapped to the wings of jets they loaded. Now, they come back with pension checks, Agent Orange scars, and local wives. They stand barefoot on the same sand they once cratered, in a country that — for reasons they're still figuring out — feels more like home than the one they left behind. Daniel Allott is the former opinion editor of The Hill and the author of 'On the Road in Trump's America: A Journey into the Heart of a Divided Country.'
CNN
a day ago
- CNN
CNN goes inside the academy preparing air traffic controllers to manage the high-stress and high-stakes skies
On a sprawling campus in the middle of the nation, thousands of students learn how to take command of the nation's skies. The Federal Aviation Administration Academy, near the Oklahoma City airport, has been a fixture since late 1946, six years before the first commercial passenger jet flight. In it, rooms filled with monitors show simulated airplanes taxiing on runways and taking off – all under the watchful eyes of students learning to keep the flying public safe. In another room, tiny airplanes sitting on tabletop boards painted with runways are testaments to how quickly one false move can make everything go wrong. Today, they are just models. Soon they will be real planes filled with passengers. It's here, at the 1,100-acre campus of the Mike Monroney Aeronautical Center, that the agency trains students to fill the over 3,000 air traffic controller jobs needed to end a decades-long shortage. This year, the FAA has expanded its onsite training by nearly 30%, with July seeing the highest number of students in training – 550 by the end of the month. The pressure and expectations are high. The center's graduates together work nearly every flight in the country - over 85,000 a day - carrying 2.5 million passengers to 20,000 different airports, according to Oklahoma City estimates. The academy 'is the introduction into air traffic,' said Chris Wilbanks, FAA vice president for mission support. 'This really is giving the students the base of what air traffic really is, introducing them slowly into kind of a walk-run phase, get into the simulation, then off to the field they go.' Following January's midair collision between an American Airlines regional jet and an Army Blackhawk helicopter near Washington in which 67 people were killed, the Department of Transportation announced plans to 'supercharge' the air traffic control workforce. Salaries for trainees at the academy increased by 30%, and the agency shaved four months off the old hiring timeline. The Academy is now the 'busiest' it has ever been, Wilbanks said, with roughly 800 to 1,000 more trainees in the pipeline than a year ago. The FAA pays training at the academy and students receive an hourly salary while they are enrolled. If students choose to go through a different program, like an FAA-supported college program, that may require them to pay tuition. Before a potential controller can even step foot in the academy, there's a rigorous application and qualification process. Under a five-step plan, they must pass an aptitude test; clear medical and background checks, then receive an offer to start training. A hiring push earlier this year referred 8,320 candidates for the required exam, though typically 90% of candidates don't make it in, and 35% of the others wash out. New controllers must also be younger than 31, and many on this campus are 19 or 20, which gives the facility the feel of a small college. After admission to the academy, students start their training with tabletop exercises. The small model planes and painted runways look like game boards, but they are designed to teach phraseology – the language of air traffic control - and maps to new trainees. 'Academy Ground, Barron 4LY request taxi to main ramp,' a student says during a recent exercise. 'Taxi to main ramp, via Delta,' the trainee controller responds as the model plane is moved along the board. 'If you don't know where the aircraft is when he calls you, you're already behind the game,' Wilbanks said. 'Getting that understanding of what the airport layout is when they call you at a visual point, or they call you coming into a certain runway, you've got that reference to be able to look out there right then and there.' Once a student moves out of tabletop training, they go on to tower simulations in wide rooms filled with video screens covering the walls - replicating the view at a real airport. 'We absolutely don't cut corners,' Wilbanks said. 'This is the basics of air traffic.' Outside the virtual tower windows is 'Academy Airport,' a fictious airfield with two parallel runways and a third cutting across them at an angle. There are real-looking airplanes on runways with proper lighting and even cracks visible in the virtual pavement. With a headset on and the push of a talk button, a trainee can take on the role of an air traffic controller. 'FedEx 2285 heavy, academy Tower, hold short runway 28, right.' It's a routine command - asking the simulated pilots to prepare for takeoff but not start rolling until given more instructions. '(If) we've got somebody on the runway in position. We want to make sure we never forget them,' said Eric Wedel, the FAA's course coordinator for tower training. He has been an instructor at the Academy since 2017 and was a controller for 28 years before that. Every new controller at the academy is different, he said; some pick it up quickly, while others require a lot of training. There's paper and pens – should a controller want to write down a call sign or something to jog their memory in the heat of the moment and runway-use memory aids. Just like you'd find in a real tower. Instructors also stress that trainees learning to work in towers should look out the virtual windows to observe aircraft rather than just relying on radar. That's where they find important pieces of information that may have been overlooked or forgotten. 'Radar is an extension of the eyeballs,' Wedel said. While the simulator can create rain, snow and wind conditions, there are some things that can't be duplicated outside of a real tower. 'It's a lot like the real thing, but in some ways it's not,' Wedel said. 'It's hard to duplicate a certain accent from a pilot or certain situation. There's unique aspects to air traffic control that it's hard to capture in a simulation. It's very close.' Downstairs in a darkened room, a line of students sit looking at radar scopes and computer monitors. It's here they train to operate in radar control centers, often far away from the planes they are directing. 'N800BA, declaring an emergency. They lost hydraulic pressure, requesting firetruck to standby,' a trainee calmly says responding to a virtual emergency as his instructor watches over his shoulder. 'Follow through on that one,' another instructor says pointing out an errant plane to another student. At the same time, the students have to keep track of turbulence and other factors that might disrupt planes trying to navigate the airspace. While these days a voice recognition computer often listens to the trainees' commands and reacts to them in real time, the FAA also hires people to operate as pilots on the other end of the radio to better emulate real-life situations. 'It is a tremendous amount of pressure,' Wilbanks said. 'Multiply that by 10 and put that in the real world. Giving people the opportunity to experience that feeling here before they step out and experience in real life is absolutely critical, but it is absolutely a rewarding job.' Graduates of the academy are placed in towers and radar centers across the country, where training continues for one to three years before they become certified professional controllers. Graduates of the Academy earn an average of $160,000 per year after three years in the field, according to the FAA. Controllers have a mandatory retirement age of 56 but can retire at age 50 with 20 years of service. The DOT has been pushing for controllers in their 50s to stay on to help alleviate the staffing shortage. It may take years of hard work to recruit and train students to close the staffing gap, but for the would-be controllers at the FAA academy there is nothing like the job. 'There's an old saying, 'Air traffic control is 90% slow and boring and 9% exciting and 1% Oh my gosh,'' Wedel said. 'Every day is different.' CNN's Devon M. Sayers contributed to this report.
CNN
a day ago
- CNN
CNN goes inside the academy preparing air traffic controllers to manage the high-stress and high-stakes skies
On a sprawling campus in the middle of the nation, thousands of students learn how to take command of the nation's skies. The Federal Aviation Administration Academy, near the Oklahoma City airport, has been a fixture since late 1946, six years before the first commercial passenger jet flight. In it, rooms filled with monitors show simulated airplanes taxiing on runways and taking off – all under the watchful eyes of students learning to keep the flying public safe. In another room, tiny airplanes sitting on tabletop boards painted with runways are testaments to how quickly one false move can make everything go wrong. Today, they are just models. Soon they will be real planes filled with passengers. It's here, at the 1,100-acre campus of the Mike Monroney Aeronautical Center, that the agency trains students to fill the over 3,000 air traffic controller jobs needed to end a decades-long shortage. This year, the FAA has expanded its onsite training by nearly 30%, with July seeing the highest number of students in training – 550 by the end of the month. The pressure and expectations are high. The center's graduates together work nearly every flight in the country - over 85,000 a day - carrying 2.5 million passengers to 20,000 different airports, according to Oklahoma City estimates. The academy 'is the introduction into air traffic,' said Chris Wilbanks, FAA vice president for mission support. 'This really is giving the students the base of what air traffic really is, introducing them slowly into kind of a walk-run phase, get into the simulation, then off to the field they go.' Following January's midair collision between an American Airlines regional jet and an Army Blackhawk helicopter near Washington in which 67 people were killed, the Department of Transportation announced plans to 'supercharge' the air traffic control workforce. Salaries for trainees at the academy increased by 30%, and the agency shaved four months off the old hiring timeline. The Academy is now the 'busiest' it has ever been, Wilbanks said, with roughly 800 to 1,000 more trainees in the pipeline than a year ago. The FAA pays training at the academy and students receive an hourly salary while they are enrolled. If students choose to go through a different program, like an FAA-supported college program, that may require them to pay tuition. Before a potential controller can even step foot in the academy, there's a rigorous application and qualification process. Under a five-step plan, they must pass an aptitude test; clear medical and background checks, then receive an offer to start training. A hiring push earlier this year referred 8,320 candidates for the required exam, though typically 90% of candidates don't make it in, and 35% of the others wash out. New controllers must also be younger than 31, and many on this campus are 19 or 20, which gives the facility the feel of a small college. After admission to the academy, students start their training with tabletop exercises. The small model planes and painted runways look like game boards, but they are designed to teach phraseology – the language of air traffic control - and maps to new trainees. 'Academy Ground, Barron 4LY request taxi to main ramp,' a student says during a recent exercise. 'Taxi to main ramp, via Delta,' the trainee controller responds as the model plane is moved along the board. 'If you don't know where the aircraft is when he calls you, you're already behind the game,' Wilbanks said. 'Getting that understanding of what the airport layout is when they call you at a visual point, or they call you coming into a certain runway, you've got that reference to be able to look out there right then and there.' Once a student moves out of tabletop training, they go on to tower simulations in wide rooms filled with video screens covering the walls - replicating the view at a real airport. 'We absolutely don't cut corners,' Wilbanks said. 'This is the basics of air traffic.' Outside the virtual tower windows is 'Academy Airport,' a fictious airfield with two parallel runways and a third cutting across them at an angle. There are real-looking airplanes on runways with proper lighting and even cracks visible in the virtual pavement. With a headset on and the push of a talk button, a trainee can take on the role of an air traffic controller. 'FedEx 2285 heavy, academy Tower, hold short runway 28, right.' It's a routine command - asking the simulated pilots to prepare for takeoff but not start rolling until given more instructions. '(If) we've got somebody on the runway in position. We want to make sure we never forget them,' said Eric Wedel, the FAA's course coordinator for tower training. He has been an instructor at the Academy since 2017 and was a controller for 28 years before that. Every new controller at the academy is different, he said; some pick it up quickly, while others require a lot of training. There's paper and pens – should a controller want to write down a call sign or something to jog their memory in the heat of the moment and runway-use memory aids. Just like you'd find in a real tower. Instructors also stress that trainees learning to work in towers should look out the virtual windows to observe aircraft rather than just relying on radar. That's where they find important pieces of information that may have been overlooked or forgotten. 'Radar is an extension of the eyeballs,' Wedel said. While the simulator can create rain, snow and wind conditions, there are some things that can't be duplicated outside of a real tower. 'It's a lot like the real thing, but in some ways it's not,' Wedel said. 'It's hard to duplicate a certain accent from a pilot or certain situation. There's unique aspects to air traffic control that it's hard to capture in a simulation. It's very close.' Downstairs in a darkened room, a line of students sit looking at radar scopes and computer monitors. It's here they train to operate in radar control centers, often far away from the planes they are directing. 'N800BA, declaring an emergency. They lost hydraulic pressure, requesting firetruck to standby,' a trainee calmly says responding to a virtual emergency as his instructor watches over his shoulder. 'Follow through on that one,' another instructor says pointing out an errant plane to another student. At the same time, the students have to keep track of turbulence and other factors that might disrupt planes trying to navigate the airspace. While these days a voice recognition computer often listens to the trainees' commands and reacts to them in real time, the FAA also hires people to operate as pilots on the other end of the radio to better emulate real-life situations. 'It is a tremendous amount of pressure,' Wilbanks said. 'Multiply that by 10 and put that in the real world. Giving people the opportunity to experience that feeling here before they step out and experience in real life is absolutely critical, but it is absolutely a rewarding job.' Graduates of the academy are placed in towers and radar centers across the country, where training continues for one to three years before they become certified professional controllers. Graduates of the Academy earn an average of $160,000 per year after three years in the field, according to the FAA. Controllers have a mandatory retirement age of 56 but can retire at age 50 with 20 years of service. The DOT has been pushing for controllers in their 50s to stay on to help alleviate the staffing shortage. It may take years of hard work to recruit and train students to close the staffing gap, but for the would-be controllers at the FAA academy there is nothing like the job. 'There's an old saying, 'Air traffic control is 90% slow and boring and 9% exciting and 1% Oh my gosh,'' Wedel said. 'Every day is different.' CNN's Devon M. Sayers contributed to this report.
