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The Celtics are helping raise awareness about a serious shortage in the U.S.

The third annual “JetBlue Rookie Flight Crew” program took off Wednesday morning at Winthrop Middle School, where the Celtics and JetBlue once again launched an educational campaign to inform a select group of 30 students about STEM-related opportunities within a workforce suffering from low supply and high demand.

“The aviation industry over the next 15 years or so is going to have a lot of people retiring,” JetBlue pilot Becca Petro told Boston.com. “Pilots have a mandatory retirement age of 65, and we don’t have nearly the people coming in that are going to be retiring.”

According to the Federal Aviation Administration, the number of pilots in the United States has decreased by 30 percent over the past three decades.