How a 28-year-old assistant professor built UND aerospace from nothing and made Grand Forks, for several days in 2021, the busiest tower in America
A Pirep featured story · KGFK Grand Forks International, Grand Forks, ND
In 1968 the University of North Dakota had no aviation program. John D. Odegard, a 28-year-old assistant professor of business administration with a private pilot certificate and a Cessna 150 on the ramp, thought it should. He pitched the dean a one-page proposal: UND would offer a bachelor's degree in aviation. The dean asked what aircraft the university owned. None, Odegard said. The dean told him to come back when he had aircraft.
Odegard went to two local businessmen and asked for airplanes. They donated a pair of Cessna 150s. He came back to the dean and got his program approved. First class: ten students.
By 1980, the John D. Odegard School of Aerospace Sciences was the largest collegiate aviation program in the country. By 1990, it was running its own air traffic control simulators and aerospace medicine research. Odegard himself died in 1998 at age 57 from leukemia; the school was renamed for him five days later. The fleet today is over 100 aircraft. Enrollment runs around 1,500 students. UND aerospace graduates are flying the line at every major US airline.
On March 1, 2, 3, and 8 of 2021 — during a brief gap in pandemic restrictions when other training airports were still recovering — the Grand Forks International tower handled more aircraft operations than any other airport in the United States. More than Atlanta, more than Chicago O'Hare, more than Dallas-Fort Worth. The traffic was almost entirely UND student pilots doing pattern work in Cessna 172s and Piper Seminoles. Tower controllers handled them at airline-controller rates, in airline-controller volumes, with first-solo students mixing with B-737s on Cape Air's commercial service to Boston via Allegiant.
The runway is the same 11,999 feet that the Cold War Air Force built in 1964 to accommodate B-52s from Grand Forks AFB seven miles west. It's the same airport where Odegard landed his Cessna 150 in 1968 to ask the dean for permission to teach students how to fly. The students fly the pattern over a North Dakota beet field and into a tower that, for a few days four years ago, was the busiest in America.