Ready for takeoff
New tango flight class starts on campus
Photo by Braylen Garren
Junior Evan Sutton works on the beginnings of the flight class plane. The Tango Flight class will be spending the next two years building a plane from the ground up.
October 14, 2022
After a short walk past the horticulture greenhouse, a large tin building sticks out like a sore thumb. No one really knows what it’s for or about the chaos going on inside. Students scramble around trying to find the right tools necessary to put parts together as the sound of drilling fills the workshop.
Starting this school year, a new program called Tango Flight was added to the campus. This class allows students interested in aeronautics to explore the field by building an airplane.
“We’ll assemble parts of the plane, a little piece at a time,” Tango Flight sponsor Seth Schirmer said. “At the end of two years, we’ll have a fully constructed plane, so they would have a lot of hands-on experience with what you would see in the manufacturing industry.”
It’s going to take a while before the students are actually able to start constructing the plane. Currently, they are working on making sure all parts of the plane have been received.
“So far this year, we’re really just continuing inventory because they shipped us four separate crates that have all the parts,” Schirmer said. “So you have to go through [all the parts], check them off the list, make sure that what they’ve sent is what we received, and then organize it in the storage closet. That way we know where everything is because it’ll take two years to build it.”
The objective of the class isn’t to just build a plane. The students also have to learn how a plane works and the technicalities of what goes into building a plane.
“Classroom-wise, they’re gonna learn a lot about the way planes work. There’s gonna
be a lot of coursework on just the different hardware because each has slightly different modifications to it in terms of the length and the size, so they’ll get a lot of practice with being able to tell [the difference between hardwares],” Schirmer said. “The other thing they gain a lot of experience with is that they’ll have to read blueprints to assemble it, and it’s very similar to what you do in the real world in terms of receiving something and having to read through it and understand what is being built, what order things are in and what parts you’re gonna be using.”
About six years ago, the school applied for a grant to add the Tango program, but initially, it got rejected. A few years later, the school resent an application, and the program was accepted.
“About two years ago, we reapplied [for the program] and we received a grant for it,” Schirmer said. “We just had to find a business to help sponsor the payment of the program. Last year, [the school] just asked me if I was interested in teaching it, and I said yes.”
All the students in the class have a shared interest in aeronautics, whether it’s because they want to fly a plane or design and build a plane.
“I’ve always wanted to be a pilot since I was a kid,” junior Evan Sutton said. “I thought it would be a really good class to learn about the plane that I’ll be flying.”
