From left, College Station High School Students Zachary Hardin, Aric Ziegelmann and Chase Zamulinski punch in rivets on the side of a fuselage of a Sonex plane kit on Thursday.
College Station High School STEM teacher Jill Conlin encourages her students to shoot for the stars. Or at least for the clouds.
Her class, Practicum in STEM, is one of what she estimates to be less than one dozen classes in the country building a fully-functional airplane. The six-student class is in its first semester and has been putting together the Sonex aerobatic two-seater plane since the beginning of the school year.
Once fully assembled, the 1,100-pound aircraft will measure 22-feet-wide and 18-feet-long and have a max speed of 197 mph. The plane kit comes with more than 10,000 rivets alone, and Conlin couldn't even guess how many pieces the finalized project will contain.
The two-seater airplane is purchased as a kit, so it is meant to be designed by novice builders, Conlin said. So far the students have finished the plane's tail and are constructing the fuselage and they still have the wings, nose and engine left to check off of their list.
Prior to the construction phase, her students had lessons on the physics of flying, along with the applicable science, math and technology they would use. The building process involves measuring rivet locations, cutting the metal pieces and crafting them together, for starters.
"It's a great way to show kids lots of different skills," Conlin said. "They're not only machining parts and putting things together, they're reading prints, working on measuring, attention to detail, and they're working together to accomplish a goal that seems unreachable at this point, but they break it down into smaller goals and make small accomplishments."
Many of the students said the process takes extreme attention to detail, which is one reason senior Melissa Wood got involved.
"I wanted a challenge, and it's neat that every day you're being challenged," she said. "I didn't think I had the amount of talent to meet the standards, but I think anybody can do it."
The majority of the funds for the $20,000 airplane kit, along with all of the tools and equipment, were donated by the Brazos Valley chapter of the Experimental Aircraft Association. Clarence Ranck, a former flight mechanic and pilot in the Army for 31 years, serves as a mentor to the project and initially proposed the program to interest students in general aviation and teach them vocational skills. Prior to the project, five out of six kids had never used a drill, he said.
The EAA compiles monthly reports on the plane's progress, and once it is completed it will be evaluated by an instructor with the Federal Aviation Administration. After its initial approved, the EAA will put the aircraft through a number of test flights.
Conlin hopes the project will be completed by December, and the goal is to allow the students to fly alongside a pilot in the plane they crafted. Of course, junior Zachary Hardin said they have two main goals.
"Once we're finished, hopefully it'll actually fly ... and we don't want any fatalities," she joked.
But Ranck will be the pilot putting the plane through its test flights, and he said he's not nervous at all.
"I get to see every rivet, I get to see every hole drilled, every piece cut and finished, so I know what goes into the airplane," he said. "Every time I fly I have a big grin on my face. I've been doing it for over 50 years, and it's just like it's the first time every time I take off."
Once the aircraft is fully approved, Conlin hopes to sell it for about $32,000. The sale would fund the purchase of the aircraft kit for next year's class, so the goal is to have the project ultimately become self-sustaining.
Conlin already has nine students signed up for the class next year, and she hopes it will grow year by year to become by application only. Because it's such a unique class, several of the students figured there would be plenty of interest.
Story and photos: http://www.theeagle.com
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