NASA grant allows Lorain students to learn art of flying

MORNING JOURNAL/SAM GREENE Eight grader Madison Cruzado pilots the flight simulator with help from classmate Marqua Black-Wright in the classroom of Jay Ferguson at Longfellow Middle School in Lorain.
MORNING JOURNAL/SAM GREENE Eight grader Nazihar Bohannon controls the yolk of the flight simulator as his classmates Madison Cruzado and Marqua Black-Wright watch and assist in the classroom of Jay Ferguson at Longfellow Middle School in Lorain.

LORAIN -- The plane dipped toward the ground as the young pilot went in for her first landing.

"Pull up," the voice of her copilot said.

"Push forward with your toes to brake," her instructor added.


The plane, leveled but it was still traveling much too quick to land. It bounced rapidly toward the waters of Lake Erie as the copilots shouted out instructions to Madison Cruzado, the first time pilot.

Sitting in front of a 60-inch television, the eighth-grader tried to readjust under the stress. The plane pitched down too hard, causing the nose to smash into the ground. The screen turned red.

Her copilots laughed; it was the third blunder of a landing that day at Longfellow Middle School.

Earlier, classmate Nazihar Bohannon missed the runway and instead put his aircraft down in a forest, the only student close to successful landing of the day.

Marqua Black-Wright followed it by crashing into Lake Erie, after missing the runway at Burke Lakefront Airport.

The students in math teacher Jay Ferguson's Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) laboratory were learning the intricacies of flying a plane, from the safety of a computer chair. As part of a NASA grant two years ago, Longfellow gained the large television and an elaborate control system for X-Plane, an advanced flight simulation program. The controls replicate the feeling of controlling an actual plane rather than mimicking a video game controller.

"It requires a great deal of coordination," Ferguson said. "They are used to controllers with a lot of buttons. The hardest thing for the kids is getting used to the fact that you have to steer the aircraft with your feet."

The set up includes foot pedals and a yoke.

"It is kind of a culminating reward," Ferguson said.

The class covers a number of topics, but has a heavy focus on using real world examples rather than reading textbooks.

The X-Plane simulator is used for about a week in the nine-week course.

"It's very similar to what they use to test pilots before they go up in the air," he said.

The program includes a scenario that allows students to take off from Cleveland Hopkins Airport and touch down at Burke Lakefront. The short flight allows multiple students to take turns using the popular simulator.

"Everyone wants a turn and nobody wants to just watch," he said.

The simulator is geographically accurate, even if some of the details are not rendered. Students could even fly over the Black River and an approximation of Lorain if they went west, Ferguson pointed out. The area is unmarked, however, he added.

The class keeps students up to date on current events happening in the world of STEM -- students watched Felix Baumgartner's space jump and the Mars landing last fall -- and tries to promote science in different ways. One lesson allows the middle school students to learn through paper airplane construction.

The idea is to show rather than tell, Ferguson said. The flight simulator pushes the class by providing an incentive for students who are doing their work right and on-time.

It seems to work, at least according to the disastrous flight crew.

"That's the easy part," Black-Wright said of taking off. "But when you try to land, that's when it gets hard."

When the NASA lab was put together in 2010, the flight simulator was a popular topic.

"Kids were all talking about how cool it was and everyone wanted to try it," he said.

The complexity of the controller and the fact that pilots often have an audience makes the flight fairly tense, Bohannon said.

"It is more involved than playing with a (video game) controller," he said.

It is engaging for the students to learn about what enables an aircraft to fly and then actually fly it.

"It makes you not want to go to sleep," he said comparing the simulator to a textbook.

The class recaptures some of the wonder of atmospheric and space flight through its simulation.

Cruzado had never used the simulator before, but she had wanted to take the class for awhile.

"Last year, I really wanted to be in the NASA classroom," she said. "You don't realize you are learning with this."