A group of high schoolers in the Quad Cities has built a two-seater airplane that’s ready to take to the skies.
The PNB Aviation Club is made up of students in the Pleasant Valley, North Scott and Bettendorf school systems.
The students are being mentored by Tom Shelton, a member of the local Experimental Aircraft Association Chapter 75.
“It is not about building the airplane,” Shelton says. “It is about educating students and developing a sense of responsibility, accountability, and bringing science and math to a practical, hands-on application.”
It took two years of planning, starting in 2019, and then four years of construction. Shelton says the students have been meeting three times a week and put in over 4,000 labor hours on the project.
“Our chapter has been discussing this, I would say, for almost ten years,” he says, “because one of the objectives of our chapter is to promote aviation knowledge in younger students.”
The airplane is called an RV-12iS. It recently was granted its airworthiness certificate and will be test flown in the coming months.
(By James Kelley, Iowa Public Radio)