Dublin High School’s Engineering Department offers many opportunities for students to attend educational field trips. One such opportunity was offered on February 26, when Dublin High’s engineering students took a field trip to The Patriot Jet Team Foundation, a prominent group of pilots that execute aerobatic maneuvers similarly to the Navy’s Blue Angels. The foundation even played a huge role in the movie Top Gun as their jets were used for footage in the movie, a testament to the foundation’s prominence and reputation.
The site of the field trip was Byron Airport, where students began their day by viewing the airport’s jets and learning about the propulsion systems that fuel them. The foundation then proceeded to describe the new opportunities in aerospace technology with the growing importance of drones and the implications this development has for the emergence of new aerospace occupations.
In the second half of the field trip, the foundation conducted a tour of the hangar. During the tour, the foundation explained their team dynamics, the importance of communication in teams, and what their everyday lives looked like. More practically, the students were able to have a close-up view of the colorful jets that entertain massive crowds with their aerobatic maneuverability. The students were even allowed to enter some jets themselves and see the interior of the planes.
After a lunch break, the students were allowed to take off on the flight simulators the Patriot Jet Team offered, giving the students a realistic idea of the effort it takes to take off on planes. Additionally, they learned about the uses of different switches in cockpits and how maneuvers like barrel rolls are performed.
“The flight simulators really encouraged me to learn more about aerospace engineering and its many applications in our everyday world,” an engineering student currently enrolled in Principles of Engineering said.
Nearing the end of the field trip, a speaker from an aerospace company called ExLabs came to explain their company’s current pursuits in aerospace engineering, offering practical insight into aerospace-centered careers. By the speaker’s account, the company hopes to collect large debris from the lower earth orbit to eliminate space pollution. This is an important initiative as space debris accumulation makes it hard for other rockets to take off later on as they have to navigate the large pieces of debris to avoid collisions. To address this problem, ExLabs designed, built, and tested a prototype: a body with six protruding arms used to collect large pieces of debris from the atmosphere.
In the future, the company aims to undertake more aerospace-related projects such as mine asteroids to learn more about space and its many possibilities. It also plans on creating another prototype that will collect asteroids and bring them back to Earth for scientific purposes. Ultimately, the speaker’s articulation of the company’s aims offered a more practical dimension to the students’ trip and inspired many with the real-world benefits of aerospace engineering.
Altogether, the field trip was an enriching experience for students as they were able to dive further into the world of aerospace, learning the fundamentals about plans and how to get them in the air, testing their flying skills on flight simulators, and learning about the different fields available to them in the future. As a result, the students left the hangar with a sense of purpose and excitement for what the future of aerospace holds for the world.
