Aviation school will open campus in Chicago

The Aviation Institute of Maintenance is opening a location in Chicago that will be its 14th U.S. campus.

The McKinley Park News reports that the the institute is converting a warehouse in the city's McKinley Park neighborhood into an aviation school. 

With 137,000 square feet of space, the airframe and power plant school will provide students opportunities to learn skills such as welding, avionics and, in the near future, certified drone piloting and maintenance.

The new warehouse fits AIM's requirements for tens of thousands of feet of space for a large, open aircraft hangar, classrooms, fabrication shops, laboratories, libraries, administrative offices and student spaces.

The school is spending $5 million on its build-out of the unfinished space. It will be the only school in the Chicago area offering a Federal Aviation Administration-certified aviation maintenance program.

The campus will have the capacity to educate up to 1,200 students at once, AIM expects about 500 students by the end of the first two years.