Jackson Coberley graduated in August from the eight-week Naval Air Forces Flight Academy, a scholarship program for high-performing 11th- and 12th-graders. He aims one day to fly for the Air Force. (Amy Coberley)
CAMP FOSTER, Okinawa — A high school senior at this Marine Corps base on Okinawa has earned his wings through a Navy flight program for exceptional students.
Jackson Coberley graduated in August from the eight-week Naval Air Forces Flight Academy, a scholarship program for high-performing 11th- and 12th-graders. He aims one day to fly for the Air Force.
The program allows students from the Navy and Marine Corps Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps to pursue their private pilot’s license while receiving college credit, the Navy said in a June 7 news release.
Coberley was one of three students from the Indo-Pacific region chosen for this year’s program.
“It was a lot of fun,” he recently told Stars and Stripes. “It’s not difficult if you’re willing to put in the work.”
The program, which takes place at three locations in North Carolina and Delaware, was launched in 2021 to expose a diverse group of students to naval aviation and inspire them to join the Navy. It features classroom instruction, more than 40 hours in single-engine training aircraft and 17 hours of solo flights.
This year, 28 students were chosen to participate but only 21 graduated with a pilot’s license, Coberley said.
Program costs of $26,000 per student are paid by the Naval Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Coordination Office under a new STEM initiative.
The U.S. military has been hampered by a “significant” pilot shortage in recent years, the Defense Department reported to Congress in July 2019.
As of August, the Air Force had a backlog of around 900 prospective pilots awaiting training, mostly due to a lack of civilian simulator instructors, unscheduled inspections and issues with training aircraft, Air Force spokeswoman Rose Riley wrote in an emailed statement Nov. 7.
The Navy has dealt with similar issues with training aircraft and instructor manning, spokeswoman Lt. Alyson Hands recently told Stars and Stripes. Over the summer, the service had 617 prospective pilots awaiting training.
Coberley, the son of Air Force avionics technician Senior Master Sgt. Darren Coberley, grew up around planes. He arrived on Okinawa eight years ago after stints in South Dakota and England.
Jackson Coberley said he decided to fly after taking five free discovery flights through the Civil Air Patrol in the U.S. in the summer of 2022. He applied for the Navy program later that year.
“It’s so pretty up there,” he said. “You see the world from a whole different view.”
At the academy, students alternate between classroom instruction, studying for their Federal Aviation Administration written exam and time in the air, Coberley said.
He flew in a Piper Warrior out of Delaware Airpark in Dover, Del. By his 10th flight, he was alone in the cockpit, relying primarily on steam gauges and his eyes to pilot the aircraft, without certain modern avionics like GPS or a ground-based navigation system.
“At that point, you know what to do,” Coberley said. “It’s just if you can get over your nerves and say, ‘Yeah, I’m going to solo this airplane.’ Then it just kind of comes naturally at that point.”
Coberley said he passed his final exam with only three days to spare. Some of the other students weren’t so lucky.
Back on Okinawa, he is flying with the Aero Club at Kadena Air Base. He hopes to attend the Air Force Academy to study computer science next year.
In addition to flying, he is taking six Advanced Placement classes and is student council executive president, vice president of the National Honor Society and an officer with the JROTC and Civil Air Patrol.
“I hold Jackson in the highest regard, and I don’t know of any other staff member or fellow student that doesn’t feel the same about him,” Kubasaki principal James Strait wrote in an emailed statement Oct. 26.
Kenneth Gipson, the senior Marine JROTC instructor at Kubasaki, agreed.
“Jackson is one heck of an individual,” Gipson said at the school in September. “He is academically sound, respectful. He’s not perfect, but he’s pretty dog-gone close to it.”
