By JONATHAN ZWEYGARDT
Hays Post
Members of the Kansas aviation industry arrived in Hays Thursday evening as part of the annual Kansas air tour designed to showcase aviation in the state.
The Fly Kansas Air Tour was established in the late 1920s as a way to highlight the aircraft industry but ended after just two years because of the Great Depression. In 2008, Ed Young, director of aviation in Kansas at the time, relaunched the tour in an effort to once again highlight aviation in Kansas. 
This year’s air tour began Thursday in Wellington and made stops in Liberal and Dodge City before stopping in Hays for the night.
Merrill Atwater, current director of aviation for the Kansas Department of Transportation, said there were 60 pilots signed up for the event and they expected about 50 pilots and 44 planes to take part in the Hays stop Thursday.
Atwater said aviation is a vital part of the Kansas economy. There are more than 750 manufacturing companies in Kansas that supply parts to aviation manufacturing companies. Kansas State Polytechnic at Salina is considered one of the top flight schools in the country, and Kansas is one of five aviation clusters in the world, according to Atwater.
“Kansas is very unique, because it represents 73 percent of all general aviation production in the world,” he said.
Atwater added the tours are a way to reach out to the community and attract people to the aviation industry.
“In the aviation industry there are two major problems that go on,” said Atwater “One, there’s a pilot shortage that’s happening and, two, is that we have a skilled workforce that needs to be replenished every few years.”
The air tour also is also a great way to get people to go to their local airport, according to Atwater.
“This airport, in this community, brings in millions of dollars worth of economic stimulus to this community and people don’t realize it,” he said.
Each stop is also another opportunity for those in the aviation industry to reach out to students and hopefully spark an interest in aviation.
In the four stops on Thursday members of the tour hosted more than 500 students. Many of the students got an up-close look at the aircraft, according to Atwater.
“It’s easy for me to talk until I’m blue in my face about how we need to educate kids on aviation,” Atwater said, “But whenever you have them out here with pilots showing them their personal plane and letting them in and climb up in there, that is the experience.
“Every pilot in the whole entire world has a time where they say, ‘that’s when I wanted to be a pilot,’ and most of the time it has to do with something dealing with aviation,” he added.
Ed Young now serves and the president of the Kansas Commission on Aerospace Education and the Fly Kansas Foundation and said the tour is another way to promote STEM – science, technology, engineering and math – education to Kansas students.
Young, who also works for an engineering firm, said, “I can tell you for a fact we need engineers. We need kids to still be interested.”
“Aviation provides an excellent example that people understand, that they can apply to their life and they can see how math is super important to what we do,” he said.
Young also said that there are aviation jobs available outside of pilots.
“In Kansas, you have to remember that there are a ton of aviation companies that have workers that are building aircraft as well,” he said.
According to Young, this year, there are air traffic controllers, an aviation insurance member and a member of the Flying Dentist Association all taking part in the air tour.
The younger generation of students, thanks to video games, come more prepared to learn to fly planes, according to Young, who is also a flight instructor.
“There’s a huge pilot shortage, so if we can grab those kids (and) they get the interest,” Young said “They go to a great state university like K-State to go through the professional pilot program, or one of the other four programs in the aviation school, we have a chance to really build solid education for our kids and jobs that earn more than the average.”
The tour continues Friday with stops in Concordia, Atchison and New Century. Saturday is the final day of the tour and there are scheduled stops in Pittsburg, Independence and Benton.