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What a great day we had on day #1 at the NW Aviation Conference and Trade Show. Our booth was always busy and it was great visiting with everyone. I was able to get some pictures before the opening and after that it was hard with so many people. If you haven’t stopped by, Sunday is the last day so please plan on attending and say hello to our students.
Made a quick dash to Van’s Aircraft to pickup our new nose gear for our recently completed RV-12 (TF4) in order to comply with the recently released SB. Hopefully we will get it installed this weekend and it will be ready to place for sale!
TeenFlight student, Donald Edwards, turned the big 18 and his Mom brought in goodies and this wonderful hat for him to wear during our build session. Hidden in that grin he's really saying "Thank you Mom, I love this hat!"
Donald is a senior in HS and a 3rd year TeenFlight student and student leader. He is in the running start program at Clover Park in their A&P program and he inspires to be a mechanic at Alaska Airlines. We are certainly going to miss him when he graduates this year.
TeenFlight has been able to build a simulator for our students through the generosity of several organizations and individuals. Our goal was to help supplement our students flight training and to reduce our cost since we provide free flight training to our students in our RV-12.
Last night we celebrated the success of interfacing our Dynon HDX with our simulator. Now our students will be able to receive their flight training using the HDX in the sim and become familiar with it before they start flying behind it in our RV-12 equipped with a HDX.
We would like to thank Dynon for donating the HDX for our sim and upgrading our SkyView Touch in our Trainer to a HDX. We also want to thank TakeFlight Interactive for partnering with us to provide our students with their interactive flight training software.
All we have left to finish is our rolling platform that the sim will be mounted on to make it easily transportable.
We will have our sim and our recently finished RV-12 at the NW Aviation Trade Show and Conference in February so stop by and visit with our students.
The picture is of Smitty getting some practice before the students slaughter his score! These kids are natural video game players and no matter how many years of flying experience you have they can make you humble in minutes!
People are always amazed how TeenFlight staff manages to have so many students and different skills levels simultaneously working on multiple planes on different phases of construction and not go insane.
Well, it certainly helps to have some great mentors, volunteers, supporters and a little special sauce. However, the real secret is that we have great students who are passionate about their future and motivated enough to make personal sacrifices to participate in our TeenFlight Program. I also have to mention that these students are backed up by parents who support them!
As our program grew and the students technical skills increased, we started focusing on leadership skills. For some, this came more natural than for others, but all were capable.
We found that putting that student is that lead role helped build their confidence and their skill level increased because they were teaching what they had learned to others. They had to pay closer attention to detail and be far more prepared since they were working with new students who have less knowledge and more questions. This sharpens their skill, which is what we were hoping for.
At the beginning of this years 2019-20 Build Program, the following students were promoted to Student Lead. These students were tasked with working with our new students on their new TF7 project:
Alexej L. - 3rd yr student
Faith F. - 2nd yr student
Mayzie L. - 2nd yr Student
Chase B. - 3rd yr Student
Max J. - 3rd Yr Student
Donald E. - 3rd Yr Student
For the first time, TeenFlight has promoted a student to the role of Student Mentor. This person is a role model to other students and helps train both new students and leads. Helps organizes and coordinates efforts between teams:
Lexi O. - 2nd Yr Student
Through the effort of these Leads and others in training, our students have made significant progress on both our TF4, TF6 and TF7 projects. They got TF4 ready for the paint shop, TF6 is now ready for engine and avionics and TF7 fuselage is well underway, tail feather are done and they are ready to start wings.
It's these Student Leads and Mentors that have allowed TeenFlight to grow to what it is today. Restrained only by the size of our facility and funding. It has allowed the mentors to step back one step further and allow the students to build and teach one another under the watchful eye of the mentors. The students not only learn technical skills, but are now learning leadership, team work problem/issue resolution and social dynamics and are more prepared for the work environment than any college graduate. These are things you can not learn in a classroom, no matter how much money you throw at it, how fancy the classroom is or how many big words you put in the title of the course.