I never knew universities helped high school seniors get involved with aviation until this happened to me:
Besides being one of my RC club’s Intro Pilot Instructors, I also volunteer with Horizon Hobby Flight School as one of their instructors. When someone buys one of their Eflite or HobbyZone trainer planes, they can enroll in the flight school, and HH finds a volunteer instructor like me near their zip code. So, HH emailed me contact information for a new student in November 2022. It was quite a story she told me.
She is in her 20s and has a Doctorate degree in Aeronautical Engineering and teaches that at the University of California in Irvine. She is 25 miles from me, but said I was the closest instructor they found for her. For the last six years, every summer, the university has a summer class for high school seniors to learn about aeronautics by building from scratch a large 4-foot RC plane. She had a local man who is an RC pilot test-fly their planes at the end of this summer class. But he retired and moved away, so she wanted to learn to fly to do his job.
So every Saturday morning for a month, she drove 50 miles round trip to my RC club field in Long Beach. She bought an Eflite Apprentice STS with a Spektrum receiver but no transmitter because the university used Futaba radios in their student planes. I have a pair of Spektrum DX9s I use with my AeroScout training plane. I downloaded her Apprentice setup file to my DX9, and she learned to fly on her plane. When she soloed, she got the official gold seal diploma I made for her and a pair of metal gold aviator wings pin. She invited me to come to the high school Fly Day next year.
Their Fly Day was two days ago, and something unexpected happened. She unexpectedly became pregnant and she had her baby seven days ago, so I took her place flight testing all the planes. There were 42 high school seniors divided into teams of six, 3 boys and 3 girls, and each had a Teacher Assistant helping them build their plane. And the planes were all different with normal tails, V-tails, T-tails, normal and swept back wings. (see photo) Each assistant had a BS degree in Aeronautical Engineering. And my preflight of most of their planes had problems to correct, such as bad hinge of control surface, control surfaces not centered, control surface too much travel, and CG way off.
This would be very overwhelming for me alone, but fortunately, my 17-year-old grandson Brayden went to help me. I had taught him to fly RC years ago, and his uncle Mike taught him to fly real planes, and Brayden now has his Private Pilot’s License.
We were there for 7 hours. I test flew the first 3 planes, and Brayden did the last 4. Two were normal wing/tail and flew ok. Two were T-tail and the Horizontal stabilizer on top of the T both were at the wrong angle, so the plane wanted to climb. We had to point elevator down. Three had swept wings, and just picking them up, we both said they were tail-heavy, but the students said no, the CG was correct. They flew very tail-heavy and barely landed right side up. They moved the battery forward 2 to 4 inches to fix.
They loved Brayden. He was their age but had a real pilot’s license and was going to the Air Force Academy. He was like a rock star to them. He was telling them as seniors about all the ways they could be successful in life in aviation. The buddy-box flying with their plane was difficult, as most did not know how to fly RC. So Brayden just did aerobatics with their planes and really wowed them. At the end, I handed Brayden two gold pilot wing pins and told him to give them to two who he thought deserved it. He gave them to high schooler Prateek and the TA Minas. The shocked look on their faces was priceless. When it was time to go, they ALL thanked us both and they all waved goodbye as we walked back to the car.
