A team Polk County students are taking a hand-on approach when it comes to making sure they have the wings needed to fly.
The Lakeland Aero Club will be assembling a Patriot Aircraft PA-18F over a span of six days at the 2021 Sun ‘n Fun Aerospace Expo. It’s an ambitious goal, according to Aron Yichye, the club’s vice president, especially considering they are also building the aircraft’s engine from scratch.
“We’ve built an engine before over three to four days, working only three to four hours a day,” he said. “Regardless of the outcome, it’s a learning experience.”
Nicholas Poucher, the club’s executive assistant, said such a project would typically take about eight months to a year to finish if students were working on it a few hours a day, two to three times a week after school.
On Tuesday morning, a stark white, frame sat in the center of an open hangar. A group of about 10 students talked about their next steps in assembling the engine while the plane’s wings laid stretched out across tables opposite the frame.
Don Wade, co-owner of Patriot Aircraft, said the aircraft kit the students are assembling is a two-person light sport trainer ideal for daytime recreational use. Once fully constructed, the plane will weigh around 1,320 pounds and have 118-horsepower engine.
“This is for the everyday flyer who is simply enjoying the flight,” he said.
The aircraft’s design will also allow for a student to pilot the craft, while a trained instructor sitting behind them can easily look on and take over the controls if needed.
Wade and his brother, Ron, will both be on hand to help walk students through the step-by-step process of assembling the aircraft. It’s a kit that starts with engineering diagrams, and the rest is up to the teens to figure out.
“They will learn all the nuts and bolts of making an airplane,” Don Wade said. “Once they are done, they will know this plane inside and out.”
Mike Zidziunas, president of the Lakeland Aero Club, said the experience will be the first time some students see how lessons taught inside their high school classrooms can be applied in the real world. He walked over to a large black tool, pulling out a top drawer displaying more than a dozen wrenches.
“You can see the light bulb come on in their heads as they see 1-inch and fractions, 5/8, engraved on the wrenches that were previously only something written on a whiteboard,” Zidziunas said. “Now, these fractions mean something and they are motivated in mathematics.”
Yichye, a 17-year-old with his pilot’s license, said it will give him and others looking to fly a better understanding of what’s under the metal, or out of sight. Other students who are interested in becoming engineers will gain a better understanding of the craft’s design and sheet metal working, according to Yichye, while future mechanics get a first-person experience.
“It’s a lot of fundamentals that most students won’t get,” he said.
Yichye said the students will be posting daily updates on the build to their Facebook page, The Lakeland Aero Club, and posting videos on its Youtube channel under Lakeland Aero Club. A GoPro camera has also been mounted to the hangar’s wall for the purposes of creating a time-lapse video that will be shared at a later date.
Zidziunas said the aircraft build also teaches the teens a valuable life lesson aside from technical aviation industry training.
“When they are done, they can say I built this,” he said. “The confidence they get from actually being able to put something together and see it go into an airplane, that confidence changes them.”