LEBANON, N.H. (WCAX) – When it comes to a kid’s education, it is cliché to say the sky is the limit. But at Lebanon High School, it just fits.
Inside a converted garage behind the school, dreams of flight are building. This is not your typical shop class. A vertical stabilizer hangs from the ceiling. A design for an RV-12 aircraft to be built is posted on the wall.
“Just watching things come together and seeing the inside of a plane and how everything works and really how simple it is,” said Kyle Hines, a senior.
Hines wants to be a commercial pilot, but like the rest of his classmates, this is his first time building an airplane.
“I’m still concerned even about how this will fly,” he said.
Tango Flight out of Texas is making the dream a reality. The Aviation Museum of New Hampshire helped raise the $300,000 needed for the project.
Senior Rebecca Ball is interested in engineering.
“It definitely puts a little pressure and stress on me, personally, to know that I need to get everything right, like perfectly right,” Ball said.
The kids will eventually fly in the plane they helped build.
“When something does go wrong, we have to make sure that it is 100% perfect and we have to problem-solve our way through it,” said Thomas Moore, a STEM instructor.
Students applied to this exclusive class. Fourteen made the cut. Some have experience in tech classes but others do not.
“We also have students who have never touched any power tools and they have had to come in and learn how to use to power tools, but they really excel at reading the high-level engineering diagrams,” Moore said.
The students say teamwork and collaboration have been the most rewarding part of the process.
Sophomore Mallory Eshbaugh says the class will also look great on her resume.
“I definitely think it will give me a leg up on some other kids, especially if I want to go into something like aviation,” Eshbaugh said.
The plane is expected to take two years to build but educators say they are ahead of schedule. Students who graduate this year will be invited back to reap the reward of their labor.
