Very few students said they’d been flying in a plane during an airport simulation event April 28 at Gillett Secondary School, but they received the finer points as they took a mock flight to Puerto Rico.
Sixth grade students went through the various steps for going on a flight, including checking in at the airport to get their tickets, going through the Transportation Security Administration checkpoints and then embarking on a 20-minute simulated flight. They learned all about how planes fly and why procedures are in place to keep people safe, complete with high school students serving as flight attendants and serving snacks and drinks during the flight.
The simulation came about courtesy of science teacher Fred Bloechl and the 11 high school students in his new wings and flights class, a semester program about aviation and how the industry went from a simple effort of getting man to fly to something that takes countless people all around the world and back again. Bloechl learned about the program years ago when he went to the Experimental Aircraft Association in Oshkosh.
Bloechl had been asked by the school to develop some semester elective classes, already teaching environmental science and astronomy. That’s when he considered the wings and flights class and developed it from the bottom up.
“(EAA) had a thing for teachers where you could incorporate or create a class,” Bloechl said. “This has been my first chance to give it a try.”
The wings and flights class started with the history of aviation, according to Bloechl, followed by the science of flying. Then the students put together model kits of various aircraft to learn the parts and functions of airplanes. The simulation is part of the class’s airport unit, where students learn about the processes in place to allow planes to take off and land in various parts of the world.
“They’ve been learning about the various parts of the airport, and when it came to the project portion, I told them about the mock airport,” Bloechl said. “Before I could give them the other two options, they were all in on that.”
The other two potential projects were making a three-dimensional model of an airport or making an airport digitally. But the high school students were far more interested in the hands-on approach involving passing what they’d learned since January on to the sixth graders.
“They’ve taken pretty much control of all of it,” Bloechl said. “They set it up; they modified it several times to get it into this form. They asked the junior high to lend us some of their sixth graders to be passengers.”
Watching films on aviation has continued to spark the interest of the high school students. The newness of the class has inspired a lot of students to want to join it, according to Bloechl, but space was limited.
“I think it’s just the hands-on and giving them the visual stuff,” Bloechl said. “They’re just drawn to it. I’m not 100% sure why they’re drawn to it. Maybe it’s the variety and the uniqueness.”
The fun’s not quite finished yet for the students, as they will be learning about careers in aviation in May. They will also put together gliders to take flight.
Gillett Secondary School sixth graders stand in line as high school students check their boarding passes as part of a mock TSA checkpoint April 28 at the school. (Lee Pulaski | NEW Media)
The first part of the mock airport experience is checking in at the airline counter, where sixth grade students get their boarding passes for the April 28 flight at Gillett Secondary School. (Lee Pulaski | NEW Media)
