[aviation news]
The University of Colorado Denver is partnering with Denver International Airport (KDEN) to launch a first-of-its-kind executive MBA in aviation, with the aim of developing and training future industry leaders.
The program, which will welcome its inaugural class in January 2026, runs for eight terms over 18 months and is designed for professionals looking to broaden their perspective on aviation while moving up into leadership roles.
“We’re really not training people to be better at what they do,” said David Chandler, a professor of management at CU Denver who serves as director of the new program. “We’re training them or exposing them to other jobs in the ecosystem, and to other points of view about what they do. And that broader perspective, we think, is what it takes to be an effective leader at any level in any kind of organization.”
Chandler emphasized that the aviation Master of Business Administration is different from the kind of career training offered by major U.S. airlines.
“My sense of that is that those programs are making those employees better company employees,” he said. “We’re training industry leaders, and to do that you have to get outside of an individual organization and see the ecosystem as a whole.”
Students will attend classes hosted at Denver airport and complete weeklong residencies at airports around the world. The course structure is meant to be flexible, so students do not have to interrupt their work to enroll. A curriculum is already established, with subjects including leadership, history of aviation, accounting, economics, crisis management, aviation security, finance, airport operations, and strategy implementation. In each term, a traditional MBA course is paired with a specialist aviation course.
“We have to walk a fine line,” Chandler said. “We’re not a generic MBA program, and we’re not a specialist MS [Master of Science] in aviation either, so we’re not trying to be either of those things. We’re trying to be something in between.”
Among the faculty is Oscar Munoz, former CEO and chairman of United Airlines, and Scott McCartney, former “Middle Seat” columnist at The Wall Street Journal. The curriculum advisory board includes Munoz, Denver airport CEO Phil Washington, former Denver mayor Michael Hancock, Andy Schneider, vice president of people at Alaska Airlines, and BJ Youngerman, managing director of global market strategy and community impact at United.
‘Why Doesn’t Something Like This Exist Already?’
Chandler, who has served as director for CU Denver’s traditional executive MBA program for over three years, said the aviation master’s degree is a much needed resource whose time has finally come.
Every other position in the aviation industry has an established track for training and development, he said, pointing to Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Arizona and Metropolitan State University of Denver’s undergraduate aviation and aerospace program. But up until now, nothing existed at the executive level.
CU Denver is in a unique position to meet that need because of its proximity to Denver International, which served 82.3 million passengers last year.
“I was talking to one prospect a couple of weeks ago and he said, ‘Why doesn’t something like this exist already?’” Chandler said. “Because you’d think it should. And I think the main reason for that is if you have this idea in the middle of this country where there isn’t a major airport, it’s hard to know what to do with it, unless you already have some sort of existing expertise in aviation. For us, to be in a major urban research university that happens to be sitting on the doorstep of the third-busiest airport in North America, the connection between those two entities is what really made this happen.”
The arrangement makes sense, Chandler added, because CU Denver gets access to the airport’s deep well of expertise, while the facility burnishes its reputation and plays a key role in shaping the next generation of industry leadership.
“For us as a business school I think it makes sense to be partnering with and supporting the major economic drivers of our region,” he said. “And in our case the biggest economic driver is the airport. From [K]DEN’s point of view, they’re number three busiest in North America and they want to be number one. And I think the way they get there, part of the way they get there, is by doing things that benefit the industry as a whole. This degree is not about making [K]DEN’s employees better at their jobs, though that’s a certain part of it. It’s about helping executive development, talent development across the industry as a whole.”
It’s taken some time and work to spread the word about the program. Because nothing like this has existed before, aviation professionals have not factored an executive MBA into their career or life plans the way workers in other industries might.
But the effort is picking up steam. From January to the start of this month, the university received about 80 inquiries about the aviation MBA. But since June 2 it’s gotten another 82.
“Just in two weeks we’ve had as much interest as the previous six months,” Chandler said.
Ideally, he would like each class to end up in the high 20s or low 30s to facilitate deep engagement among students and faculty.
When asked how he pictures a future applicant, Chandler said the average age in CU Denver’s traditional MBA program (41.5 years old) would work well for the aviation master’s.
“That to me is a really good age to be doing this degree,” he said. “You have enough experience where you bring a lot of value to the classroom conversation, but you’ve still got enough runway to go where an investment like this makes sense, you have enough 15 years, maybe more.”
Outside of experience level, though, there’s no template for a typical student.
Chandler said he envisions the program attracting airline and airport employees, workers involved in the aviation supply chain, professionals from companies like Boeing, Airbus, Amazon, and FedEx, caterers who provide food for flights, advertisers who place ads in airport terminals, insurance agents who write aviation policies, members of trade unions and nonprofits, and even environmentalists with concerns about the industry’s impact on the world.
“The more varied voices we get, that speaks to the potential for the optimal learning environment to occur,” he said.
He even sees promise in a situation where “diametrically opposed voices” share the same classroom, as long as the conversation stays respectful.
“What we’re training is leaders of the organization, leaders of the industry,” he said. “And in order to do that you need a little bit of knowledge about everything.”
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