UVU Flight School Field Trip

This plane is a Diamond DA-20

We had the best field trip to the UVU flight school at the Provo Airport! It was way better than we even hoped for. I had seen on their website that they offered tours for "prospective students," so I emailed about it sort of tentatively, wondering if they would consider children as young as mine to be "prospective students." The girl I talked to, Ashley, was AWESOME. She was so friendly and nice and totally willing to set up a time for us to come.

I figured they'd probably show us a few classrooms and give us a brochure or two, and I was hoping maybe we could peek out the window at the planes, too. I thought the airport security was probably high, like it is everywhere, so I doubted they'd let us into any actual working areas of the airport.

Our tour guides were so great. They were some recent graduates of the flight school, I think (one was about to become an instructor?) and I wish I could remember their names. I think one of them was Doug. Anyway, they were the nicest guys. They talked about all kinds of things the children were interested in, and they patiently answered question after question. It was perfect.

And THEN, they took us right out onto the airfield to see the planes! And not only did they let us look at them, but they let the kids climb up and sit inside and work the controls! They were SO happy. Just look at their faces! :)

This is a Diamond DA-24

UVU has a few different types of small planes for students to learn on. We sat in all of them. They are really cute, lightweight aircraft.

Now that is a happy smile on Sebby.

We saw several helicopters taking off. There is a helicopter flight school there too, I think.

Junie was pretty excited about it all.

It was a really cool windy, stormy day. The clouds were so beautiful.

After seeing the planes, our guides took us in to see the simulators. This one was good because it was kind of a low-tech beginner one, and they let the children push all the buttons they wanted to.

This was the next tier up. We weren't allowed to push buttons on this one. :)

And this was the big simulator, which looks just like a commercial airplane cockpit (it happened to be a CRJ-200, which is Seb's favorite plane, so that was great). The children LOVED sitting in here. They peppered our guide with questions. He was so patient. He even said we could schedule a time to come back and try out the simulators sometime. We will certainly take him up on that!

To sum up: the UVU Aviation Program looks awesome. We love them. We learned a lot and thought this was one of our best field trips ever!

Flight simulator

At the beginning of the unit, I found a few options for free flight simulators (limited ones, of course, that you can use on your home computer) online. I downloaded one of them, but honestly, when I tried to read through the lengthy .pdf of instructions, I thought we'd never be able to use it. I couldn't even figure out what keys you were supposed to push to take off! But, I told the boys if they could figure it out, they could use it.

Of course, they figured it out. It took them many days of trial and error and watching online tutorials, but first they were saying, "I did it! I took off!" and then, "I figured out how to turn on autopilot!" and then "I landed without crashing!" and then "I found another airport!" and then "I tried landing on an aircraft carrier!" I was amazed. They downloaded a bunch of other planes and scenery packs, so they're always flying some new thing, too—the Wright Flyer or the SR-71 Blackbird—or the Follow-me car (they are very silly). It's been really fun for them. We don't have a joystick or anything, but apparently there are enough ways to use the keyboard that they can still make it work.

Flight simulators are pretty amazing, actually. We watched this video that shows clips of how they've looked since they were first used, and it's unbelievable how far they have come! The ones real pilots use now are almost indistinguishable from reality. I would love to go in one of those someday.

Anyway, the program they use is called Flight Gear, and you can download it (and learn more about it) here: http://www.flightgear.org/.

I like all the different views you can switch between---there's more than just the cockpit view

Wing view

A short video of Sebby taking off