Sometimes the best outcome starts as a bitter disappointment. Mobile’s rise as an aviation manufacturing city traces directly to a government tanker contract the city won and then lost — and to the people who turned that loss into Airbus’ only final assembly plant in the United States, and later into one of the most inventive workforce training centers in the country.
The Tanker That Got Away
In 2006, Michelle Hurdle was part of the State of Alabama team that recruited Airbus to build the military’s new aerial refueling tanker at Mobile’s Brookley Field. The prize seemed secured — until Boeing appealed the contract award, Congress rescinded it, and after three years of protests and re-bids, Boeing won the tanker in 2011.
For the Mobile area it was a gut punch. But Airbus, having liked what it saw in Mobile, pivoted: instead of tankers, it would build its A320 passenger jet family at Brookley Field. What had been pitched as a military assembly line became the site of Airbus’ first U.S. final assembly line — a win that reshaped the economic landscape of the entire Gulf Coast.
Airbus recognized talent in the process. Hurdle, a Satsuma native with a geography and social sciences degree from Troy University and a master’s in economic development from the University of Southern Mississippi, was hired to represent Airbus Alabama as its economic and community relations director. She arrived in 2008 and worked project agreements, government relations and community engagement as the A320 final assembly line rose at Brookley. In June 2015 the first main fuselage arrived; in April 2016 the first Alabama-built aircraft, an A321, was delivered to JetBlue.
Flight Works Is Born
In 2018, the State of Alabama and Airbus partnered to create Flight Works Alabama, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit built around a simple premise: workforce development through inspiration, education and certification. Hurdle was named its president and charged with creating its programs from the ground up. Construction began in 2019 and the doors opened in August 2020 — into a pandemic, as it happened.
The centerpiece is a 15,000-square-foot exhibit gallery that connects manufacturing, careers and the story of aviation in ways designed to stick with teenagers. More than 40 hands-on exhibits include eleven virtual experiences — forces of flight, aerodynamics, flight and drone simulators — an outdoor drone aviary, and a virtual paint exhibit where visitors design their own aircraft livery. Crucially, Flight Works is also the starting point for every Airbus final assembly line tour, which makes it the only place in the country where the public can watch commercial jets being born.
“Our goal was to showcase hundreds of careers associated with aerospace and aircraft manufacturing,” Hurdle has said. “Through more than 40 hands-on exhibits, our guests leave Flight Works Alabama with the knowledge and understanding of the many opportunities Airbus and similar industries offer.”
We Build It Better — Everywhere
When the pandemic closed field trips, Hurdle’s team pivoted to reach middle schoolers another way. Partnering with the State of Alabama, Airbus, Alabama Power, Snap-on Tools, Amazon Web Services and Mott MacDonald Engineering, they created We Build It Better — an 18-week program that turns the classroom into an interactive workplace for middle school students.
The program ships as a package: curriculum, a Snap-on tool cart, industry-grade tools, a 3D printer, consumable materials, a week of teacher professional development and the resources to deliver it all. Schools purchase it, and demand has carried it far beyond Alabama — the curriculum has been adopted in more than a dozen states and hundreds of schools, and has expanded internationally to the United Kingdom, with teacher training sessions hosted everywhere from Huntsville to Kansas to Britain.
The data coming back has surprised even its creators: higher math grades, lower absenteeism, better conflict management. Teachers asked for more, and Flight Works answered with We Will Build It Better, an elementary cross-curriculum version for first through fifth graders.
From Classroom to Cockpit — or Assembly Line
Flight Works also built the on-ramp into actual aviation jobs. FlightPath9 is a pre-employment training program that can lead to an apprenticeship and a future at Airbus. In partnership with Bishop State Community College, Flight Works helped develop an Aviation Manufacturing Technology short certificate program carrying 18 college credits. FlightPath9 runs three tracks — one for high school seniors, with evening classes two nights a week over ten months, and two early-career tracks for graduates with up to five years of work experience, run as intensive ten-week, five-day-a-week programs. Coastal Alabama Community College offers a parallel technical track for students pursuing their Airframe certification.
The Visit
Once Covid restrictions lifted, Flight Works Alabama settled into a steady draw of ten to twelve thousand visitors a year, pulled from all over the world by the assembly line tour. The gallery tour runs $13.50 per person with group and children’s rates, takes about 90 minutes self-guided, and is geared toward middle school and up. The facility opens to the public 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Tuesday through Friday, and additionally runs a chartered bus tour of the Airbus Final Assembly Line on four Saturdays a year, four tours daily. It also books private parties, corporate events and seminars — it has even hosted a wedding.
“Being from this area and being a part of its inception and watching it grow up has been an awe-inspiring experience,” Hurdle has said. “Airbus has had a generational impact transforming the community. We now see the 2nd generation of Airbus employees creating opportunities for themselves here.”
A lost tanker contract was supposed to be the end of the story. Instead, it became the prologue — to an assembly line, a classroom, and a workforce pipeline that now reaches from Mobile to 13 states and beyond.