The playground at Crosby Park Elementary School was recently in dire need of an air traffic controller.
Planes were skittering across the basketball court, veering off course across the playground, nose diving into the ground and landing in trees. One even crashed into the backstop of the baseball field. It looked as if someone needed to call the National Transportation Safety Board to investigate all the accidents.
Fifth graders were the ones behind all the chaos as the flights were the culmination of a unit of study on aviation taught by fifth grade teacher Christina Leija.
Previously, students had assembled planes from balsa wood before graduating to remote control GHOSTX3 planes made from foam board. The GHOSTX3 planes were the ones flying around the playground as students tried to master the remote control, which was unfamiliar to most of them.
But first, students had to get their planes airborne, which proved to be no easy task. Richard Bradford discovered getting a plane to take off was harder than it looked.
"If you don’t throw it precisely, it will go to the ground, like that one,” he said as he saw someone else’s plane crash.
Akira Fleener thought she had discovered the key to getting the plane up in the air.
“Throw it up high so it has more air,” under it, she said.
It took several attempts for most of the planes to become airborne. As students tossed them into the air, they immediately nosedived back to earth.
Shaelyn Sullivan said it was harder to operate the remote control than it was to launch the plane; the plane she was operating also crashed.
“You have to make sure it doesn’t go over the fence or dives down and breaks,” she said. When her plane crashed, the battery came out and grass got into the wheel assembly. She and her teammates removed the grass and replaced the battery, yet the plane refused to work.
One student who seemed to have a great degree of success getting his plane to lift off was Ian Hoyt.
“Basically, I threw it at a certain angle,” he said. “You have to throw it high enough and far enough.”
Once Hoyt achieved liftoff, the plane flew higher and farther than most, flying into a high arc across the playground.
“How I got it to fly so far, I kept on keeping it steady,” he said. But his plane ultimately suffered the same fate as those of his classmates. “When I tried to turn it, I think that is when it crashed. Something was wrong with the trajectory. It couldn’t turn. I tried turning it to make it come back to us, but it didn’t work.”
The plane crashed high into the branches of a tree outside the playground fence.
Leija went to retrieve it, as she had many others, but she came back empty-handed. While the homeowner was agreeable to letting Leija into her backyard, the plane was too high in the tree.
“I tried to throw a football at it, but it didn’t come down,” Leija said. Leija said a tall ladder and a tall person were needed.
Alana Paschal had been looking forward to flying the plane since she and Itana Tauvela helped assemble one the week before.
“It may be difficult,” she said at the time. “The wind may be blowing. I love making fun crafts and activities and working on big activities like this.”
Tauvela said she is very interested in planes.
“I like how when you are flying planes, you have all these buttons. I just like solving problems,” she said.
Tauvela said she has flown balsa planes and mini cardboard planes before.
Trying to launch the plane and then man the remote, was harder than Paschal thought it would be. She said throwing it was harder than working the remote because, “I can’t throw it that well,” she said.
She said the experience did not live up to her expectations.
“It didn’t fly as high as I expected it to,” she said. “The controller was harder. But it was fun; I’m not disappointed.”
Even though the experience was not quite what Paschal had hoped for, she still learned something.
“Sometimes things don’t go as planned, but you have to keep working on it,” she said. She said the best part was building the plane.
Paschal wasn’t the only one who learned something about flying planes. Leija also learned a few things.
“The planes had better flight trajectory and better range than I thought they would,” she said after the event. “I wasn’t expecting them to fly so well. I was expecting lower flights and more nosedives.”
Four of the three planes were in need of repairs after the flight exercise; the fourth had yet to be assessed because it was still residing in a tree. Leija planned to turn the repair jobs into another aviation lesson.
"We can learn about the mechanics of it. That’s a part of the lesson,” she said. “We had a blast. That was more important. Now we have something to fix. We have a lot of tinkerers in our class.”
The planes, which were purchased through a grant from the Lawton Public School Foundation, will live to fly another day. Leija will use them this summer when she teaches aviation at Makerspace camp.