Teaching the Aviation Merit Badge with FT Planes

Hi there Flite Test Community!  Today I will be telling you a bit about how I taught the Aviation Merit Badge using model aviation and Flite Test airplanes.

First off, my name is Nicholas Block, and I am a high school junior in Illinois.  I have been a Boy Scout since first grade, so it is a truly integral part of my life.  Through scouting, I have learned valuable outdoor skills as well as many leadership skills.  The ideals on which scouting is formed very closely resembles Flite Test's ideals.

I have also made many friends through flight.  My good friend Daniel and his family invited me to join them at Flight Fest last summer, and I had a fantastic experienceI  Volunteering at Flight Fest inspired me to share my love for aviation with my Boy Scout troop.  Teaching the aviation merit badge gave me a way to connect my love for scouting with my love for flight, and hopefully show some of the other scouts how great model aviation really is.

Once I had the idea to teach a merit badge seminar to my scouts, I started looking into the logistics of putting such an event together.  Most importantly, I had to decide how much to charge each scout.  I factored in the price of the airplane kits themselves, the cost to rent the location for the class, the price for food, and the price for other materials.  Part of the event also involved training the scouts on pre-built tiny trainers via a trainer cable, requiring the electronics for those airplanes.  Unfortunately, the weather didn't cooperate on the day of the seminar so we held the flight training a few days later.  The planes that they actually got to build and taken home were of the glider variety.

The new gym at my church was a great indoor flying venue! 

Another important thing you need to consider when earning a merit badge is approval.  Certain adults, called merit badge counselors, are trained to approve scouts who have earned all the requirements of a certain merit badge.  I contacted a counselor I knew well, and he was glad to come and help!  Some more of the preparatory work included making a video walking the scouts through all of the book work that had to be completed prior to attending the seminar.

This is the video that I sent out to the scouts a few weeks before the event.  I discussed how airplanes work, licensing, and much more.  I also outlined what they needed to have completed prior to the event to maximize our time building the planes.   More information is in the video's description.

Aviation Merit Badge Workbook (This is the file for the workbook the scouts needed to fill out.)

I also sent out another video that Daniel and I shot a week before the event as a sort of teaser.  This showed them some of the air-to-air that they might be seeing at Flight Day (my unofficial name for the event).

Here we're kicking off Flight Day.  We started off by taking care of the book work that I had discussed in the video.  It was really nice to have some of my friends helping me teach as well, since there were some areas they had more knowledge than I.  In short, we went through the merit badge booklet and explained aviation concepts, using many hands-on props (pun intended) to aid our teaching.

Getting the scouts building was the real high point of the day.  Seeing so many new modelers discover foamboard airplanes was really exciting!  I can't say it was easy teaching 20 people to build, even with an army of 5 volunteers.  It was a challenge, but it all worked out in the end.  My main strategy was to teach some of the scouts who were farther along so that they could pass along what they had just learned.

Now for the actual flying!  Since it rained the entire day, we weren't able to train the scouts on the pre-built airplanes, but we did do that a few days later.  At Flight Day, we pulled scouts out from the building room to try their hand at the simulators, which proved to be great fun for them!

The real fun came in with the chuck gliders.  We weighted down the noses with 30 caliber lead bullets, since someone was clever enough to bring those along.  (No cartridges, that woud be very dangerous!)  There were competitions of distance, flight time, and aerobatics.  It turned out to be just as much fun to watch as it was to fly!

The grand finale of Flight Day was to show the scouts what RC aviation is all about.  My friend Daniel and I gave a flight demonstration with an RC airplane and a quad.  Daniel chased me with the quad, and the scouts looked through a bunch of video glasses during the demonstration.  The scouts were fascinated!  You can see our demonstration in the very first video of this article.

After the event, I sent out some follow-up information on how the scouts could get into the RC hobby through the Tiny Trainer complete starter kit from the Flite Test Store.  Several of the scouts and a couple of their parents have approached me about pursuing the hobby, so hopefully the Flite Test community will be growing!

I would like to thank all of my volunteers, Daniel, Hari, Kyle, Noah, Mr. Hansen, my parents, and everyone who attended Flight Day.  You all really helped turn my dream into a reality.  Thank you!