About Victor Kilo Fund

In Greek, Victor Kilo means, “A thousand victories.” The goal of the Victor Kilo Fund is to create at least a thousand wins in the form of resources, education and programs to support talented-and-worthy, deserving-yet-under-resourced people striving to launch sustained careers in aviation and aerospace. In other words, the Victor Kilo Fund launches diverse, CAVU careers in aviation.

Whether your aviation or aerospace career goals are to be a pilot, a mechanic, a dispatcher, an air traffic controller, meteorologist, an engineer or an astronaut, Victor Kilo Fund sees you, hears you and holds a space where with hard work, focus, resilience and persistence, such careers can be realized.

These careers will do more than maintain an $842 Billion dollar aviation industry employing over 10 million people. Bringing a diverse group of people into the aviation industry will be the difference between a post-2030 aviation industry still aloft, and one that is grounded by a lack of skilled workers.

It’s true.

By 2030, the aviation and aerospace industries will need:

• over 30,000 new pilots in the U.S. and over 250,000 new pilots globally
• over 130,000 new aviation mechanics in the U.S. and over 400,000 new AMTs globally
• over 24,000 new Air Traffic Controllers in the United States alone, and
• over 3,800 aerospace engineers

If it can’t attract a pool of talent from all areas of society to fill those jobs by 2030, the pace of retirements in all aviation industry sectors will stall the industry, possibly irreparably.

ABOUT THE FOUNDER

Jeffrey “JJ” Madison is a Harvard-educated airline pilot, aviation safety expert, flight instructor, mentor pilot and author. He has successfully raised about one-quarter of a million dollars for climate-related projects. These include two rounds of funding from the Ford Foundation to produce over 600 episodes of The Climate Daily podcast. He also planned and executed three successful reforestation fundraising campaigns where a few hundred people contributed enough to plant ten thousand trees each in northern California, in British Columbia, Canada, and in two forests in the midwest U.S. and in Israel.

He He knows all about the power of a thousand little victories. You see, JJ didn’t actually start flying until his mid-30s, and he might never have flown had he not met and been mentored by a team of black and female aviators, including three elderly Tuskegee Airmen.

“There’s a phrase: ‘Until you see it, you can’t be it.’ I was the living embodiment of that. Although I’d wanted to fly since I was 8. It wasn’t for another 27 years, at age 35, when I met for the first time, Black pilots from the California Black Aviation Association, that I could ‘see it’, and I finally achieved my airplane private pilot.”

Through the CBAA, I met two Black, female astronauts, and three legendary Tuskegee Airmen: Mr. Foreman—a Tuskegee instructor pilot who taught with incomparable instructor C. Alfred “Chief” Anderson; Roger Terry and Lee Archer. That’s when I at last did see that, I, could possibly become an airline pilot. After all, if they could become astronauts and WWII heroes despite all the odds….Their guidance and mentorship fueled the ‘thousand wins’ I had to achieve my goal of making it onto the flight deck of an airline.”

JJ also knows about beating the odds. He’s had two airline careers. His first one stalled out, like many thousands of other pilots, when the fierce headwinds of the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 forced airlines to shed tens of thousands of pilots. It would be another 15 years before he’d get a second chance. In the meantime, he stayed resilient and hopeful. He kept up his First-Class Medical, his pilot instructing license, and continued to stay current in his flying. He also stayed active in aviation by writing for aviation publications, including AOPA Magazine, AOPA Flight Training, Atlantic Flyer, and most notably, General Aviation News. There he penned a monthly column for six years called, “Human Factors,” analyzing pilot reports from the FAA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System database, aka the NASA Reports.

His determination paid off. In 2023, at age 60, JJ was once again hired to fly for the airlines. “All that time, I kept in my mind how those Tuskegee Airmen, the men and women in the CBAA, OBAP and AIR, Inc.—an entire team of people—used their skills in service of me, helping me become the very best aviation professional I can be. Those people believed in me even on the days when I didn’t believe in myself. The least I could do would be not to waste all that effort by giving up.”

See JJ’s full bio here