How to Craft a Legacy Survey says Quick Start No. 1

How to Craft a Legacy

Through decades of Pratt & Whitney’s tech advancements, Quick Start’s longest relationship continues to strengthen

One hundred years after introducing an innovative new airplane engine, in 2025 Pratt & Whitney (“P&W”) is celebrating its centennial as part of RTX, one of the largest aerospace and defense companies in the world.

In 1980, Pratt & Whitney had just inked huge contracts for its world-class products and was scouting the country to find the perfect site to build a much-needed manufacturing plant. By November, they found their ideal location: Columbus, Georgia.

The community was supportive. The costs were competitive. And there was this little-known program called Quick Start tucked within the state’s department of education that was offering free training for P&W’s “factory of the future.”

[Travel through a timeline of Pratt & Whitney’s long-time relationship with Georgia Quick Start.]

At the time of its 1984 grand opening, a Pratt & Whitney spokesperson, Phillip Giaramita, told the local newspaper that workforce training had been a big factor in the location decision. “We were very impressed with such innovative programs as Quick Start,” he said. “We have not been disappointed with the way [the Quick Start program] turned out.”

Forty years later, Pratt & Whitney’s campus includes both Columbus Forge, which produces compressor airfoils and titanium forgings, and the Columbus Engine Center (CEC) which maintains Pratt & Whitney GTF™ engines for the Embraer E-Jets E2, Airbus A220 and Airbus A320neo aircraft families along with F117 and F100 engines. It employs more than 2,500 people and services both military and commercial aircraft engines.

As the company has undergone three major expansions in Georgia, it has looked to Quick Start to build a customized training program for its new hires.

“Without a doubt, the most impactful benefit of the Quick Start program has been preparing our mechanics to be successful on the shop floor,” says Jason “Jay” Kosmas, General Manager of Pratt & Whitney’s CEC. “The Quick Start team’s new hire orientation program sets a solid foundation for our mechanics to continue to build upon.”

Aviation Maintenance 101

During the 1980s, Quick Start was collaborating with what was then the Columbus Area Vocational-Technical Institute (now Columbus Technical College). By the end of the decade, a new agency was created: the Department of Technical and Adult Education (DTAE) and the Quick Start program was folded into what would later become the Technical College System of Georgia.

It was in the mid 1990s that Quick Start hit its stride. Key to Quick Start’s transformation was the Pratt & Whitney project led by former Quick Start trainer Joe Bailey. Bailey pioneered an approach to hands-on training that remains a core part of Quick Start’s philosophy today.

It seems obvious now. That’s how great ideas work. For Pratt & Whitney, Bailey developed what came to be known as “the alternator exercise.” Each trainee got a handbook with step-by-step instructions for how to disassemble and reassemble various alternators sitting in front of them.

“The emphasis was not on just rebuilding an alternator, but rebuilding it per the instructions,” says Mike Ross, who went through the original Quick Start training at Pratt & Whitney 22 years ago. “I had never built an alternator before, but one mechanic in our class had been building them for years. And because he just put them together without following instructions, he had to take his apart and redo everything.”

New Jobs, New Horizons

The company announced investments of $65 million in 2016 and $386 million in 2017 in the Columbus campus. These investments included retrofitting and equipping its Columbus Engine Center to perform on-site maintenance on the Pratt & Whitney GTF engines as well as other expansion projects across the Columbus campus creating roughly 500 new jobs. To support the expansion, the company re-engaged with Quick Start to train its new hires.

Columbus Technical College offered training space to Quick Start for training Pratt & Whitney for the project, which included job-specific training such as engine maintenance, as well as safety and productivity enhancement classes.

“The maintenance course taught me more than I ever thought I could know about turbines,” said Justin Shepherd, who has worked at Pratt & Whitney for five years. “I’d worked in manufacturing, but never on turbines, and I felt confident on the floor after being on the job for just one week.”

Unfortunately, Quick Start’s training for Pratt & Whitney’s expansion had just begun to ramp up when the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States, which cut in-person training short for Shepherd and his coworkers. Quick Start worked through this limitation by having trainees finish their coursework online, and Pratt & Whitney’s relationship grew even stronger after the pandemic abated.

“Before we started working on our latest expansion in 2023, we executed a process mapping event and spent a week talking about the training program as it existed at that point in time and what we wanted the program to look like moving forward,” said Jesse Peabody, Program Manager for Pratt & Whitney’s Customer Training Center. “One topic that was consistently brought up throughout the event as a best practice was Quick Start.”

Passing the Test

Pratt & Whitney’s latest expansion, announced at the Paris Air Show in 2023, includes an 81,000-square-foot addition to the CEC with a goal of increasing overhaul capacity to 400 engines per year. The expansion will create around 400 new jobs in the Columbus area by 2028.

After a week of new hire orientation, all new CEC mechanics undergo two weeks of Quick Start training, which includes a variety of company-specific courses including an overview of the company, precision measurement, and shop math. Trainees also learn about federal regulations for aviation safety.

“Quality and safety are of utmost importance, because, as they say, there are no pit stops at 30,000 feet,” said Brandon Chadwick, Quick Start’s training coordinator who is leading this project at Pratt & Whitney.

Trainees begin with classroom training to learn the basics and then progress to hands-on exercises.

Ron Tsuruda, a Pratt & Whitney employee who has gone through Quick Start training previously, says of the current training: “It’s been very informative, and I think it’s going to prepare mechanics a lot better. Once we’re finished, I feel very confident this class of mechanics is going to be ready.”

Before mechanic or inspector personnel are allowed to perform maintenance at CEC, they are required to complete a training program that may include formal classroom, hands-on and on-the-job training. Included in the training program is a written test to verify qualification and proficiency prior to performing maintenance independently. Testing is administered by CEC, and data shows that trainees who have completed Quick Start courses have higher pass rates the first time they take the test, leading to quicker return on investment and higher productivity for Pratt & Whitney.

Decades of Success

Over the years, technologies have advanced, the company’s campus has expanded, its relationship with Georgia Quick Start has remained strong. Pratt & Whitney is celebrating its centennial anniversary as a company this year, as well as a 45-year relationship with Quick Start. (See a timeline of Pratt & Whitney’s Quick Start milestones on page 12)

“The Quick Start program really sets a precedent and allows people to come in and understand Pratt & Whitney’s process,” said Adam Starrett, an operations supervisor at Pratt & Whitney and a former aircraft mechanic. “Bar none, Quick Start should be the standard for any company, anywhere. Every company should get this kind of training.”