Crash or fly, it’s on the whim of the wind

Crosby Park Elementary School students learned something about Oklahoma wind last week — it can either crash your plane or send it soaring. But either way, you must deal with the wind.

The students were fifth graders in Christina Leija’s class who have been studying the history of flight. Leija is a member of the Civil Air Patrol and wanted to teach her students about aviation. To that end, they built self-propelled balsa planes during their Makerspace class and then took them to the playground for a test flight.

The students quickly learned flying a plane isn’t as easy as it looks.

Camilla Potts, 10, was the first pilot to fly her group’s plane, which was powered by a rubber band wound tightly around the propeller. Potts’ plane flew 12 feet, 5½ inches before crashing to the ground.

“It went directly down,” Potts said. “I released it down instead of in the middle. I kinda threw it in the dirt. I was expecting it to be like a rocket ship.”

Potts decided that her throwing motion was part of the problem.

“I should have wound it tighter and released it higher,” she said. “Airplanes are hard to fly because you have to twist the rubber band a lot.”

Potts said she wants to be a helicopter pilot because, “I come in clutch. In stressful situations, I’m good at calming people down.”

Makennah Foster, 10, had slightly more success with her plane. It went 19 feet, 2 inches.

“I wound it up a lot and pushed off my front leg. I gave it a lot of thrust,” Foster said, explaining her technique. “I thought it would go only 10 feet.”

She learned how to throw from her dad, who coached football, and credited him with teaching her how to throw for the plane’s long flight — that and the wind.

“The wind gave it more boost, so it went farther,” she said.

The wind also proved to be a boon to Jace Eskildsen, 11. His plane flew the farthest distance at 60 feet.

“I just wound it up a lot and threw it up,” he said. “I threw it as hard as I could.

It’s difficult, including the wind. I thought it would go straight down and break. I wound it up a lot.”

He thinks he would be a bad pilot because the plane flew a squiggly line.

“It was difficult but also cool,” he said of the experience.

Flying the planes was the students’ reward for assembling them in the first place, which was easier said than done. Students worked in groups of three the previous week mulling over the instructions as they attached the wings, propeller and tail assembly.

“It wasn’t really hard,” Jayde Coleman, 11, said as she labored over the plane. She said she read the instructions and looked at the picture to figure it out.

Alexander Baggett, 11, dispensed with the instructions and looked at the picture of the finished plane to try to assemble his. Teammates in his group passed the plane back and forth as they tried to figure out how the pieces fit together.

Other students said they had learned about parts of the plane and such concepts as thrust, drag, force and lift. And they also learned about the history of flight.

“The Wright brothers were very important,” said Serenity Beard, 10.

Learning about flight and the process of flight was more important than the planes soaring across the playground.

“It is all experimental,” Leija said. “If you aren’t making mistakes, you’re not learning.”

The solo flights on the playground aren’t the last time students may take to the skies this year. Leija just received some GHOSTX3 remote control planes. Once students master the airspace around Crosby Park with those planes, they will test their skills with flight simulators. Some of the planes, and the flight simulators, were funded through a grant from the Lawton Public School Foundation. The Civil Air Patrol also donated some extra balsa planes and some self-propelled wood planes, which the students haven’t used yet.