Can they build an entire airplane in two weeks? Build a Plane is betting they can.

If you’re in aviation, you’ve probably heard that phrase before—particularly if you did an accelerated rating or a type rating. Today I heard that phrase applied to the process of building an airplane.

“Building an airplane” and “drinking from the firehose” are generally not concepts that you hear in the same conversation, but when you consider that we’re talking about assembling an Experimental kit in two weeks, it all makes sense.

The kids who took their first deep drink from the firehose today are eight teenagers from high schools in Michigan and Minnesota. They are the winners of an aviation design contest sponsored by Build a Plane and the General Aviation Manufacturers Association. School’s out, and they’re here in Arlington, Wash., to spend some quality time with fiberglas, rivets, and bucking bars.

The day began at 7 a.m. with a briefing at Glasair’s Customer Assembly Center at Arlington Airport. (We should all have hangars this immaculate and organized. Talk about a place for everything and everything in its place!) By the first morning break, the students had begun mounting rudders and installing rudder cables, and mounting the main landing gear and tires. In another corner, fuel lines were being threaded along a wing.

Glasair’s Two Weeks to Taxi program has several years under its belt, and the level of preparation that goes into it is evident. To the casual observer, today looked a little like “organized chaos,” as one observer put it—but it was also apparent that a lot of progress was made. That’s good, because the plan is to get the first of the two airplanes ready to taxi on Wednesday, June 26, and an FAA inspection on Saturday, June 29.

Will they make it? Stay tuned as I post updates from Arlington and the progress of the Build a Plane/GAMA projects.

Two unusual landings. School children at Brevard Elementary School in North Carolina got quite a show when a Cessna 182 made an emergency landing on their soccer field, reports the Rocky Mount Telegram. The children at Chairville Elementary School in Medford, Pa., got a similar thrill when a Marine CH-46E helicopter landed at their school, reports PhillyBurbs.com.

Good thing no one was home. A pilot was forced to make an emergency landing right at the door of a home in Eatonville, Wash., reports Q13FOX.com.  The pilot said he was trying to avoid a rain squall.

Any landing is a good landing.  The pilot of a Beechcraft BE55 was forced to do a belly landing at John Wayne Airport reports the Newport Beach Patch. The pilot was was uninjured, but the airport was forced to close a runway for about an hour.

Drugs and rock ‘n roll? I’m shocked (not)! The original members of the heavy metal band Black Sabbath recently admitted that during their heyday in the 1970s they had cocaine flown to them via private planes, reports The List.

We’ll end the week with this new Embraer video — Legacy 500 – “The Unbelievable” – starring action star and company ambassador Jackie Chan. Enjoy!

The kids won the challenge by creating an airplane design and test flying a virtual airplane. Lest you think these kids simply plugged some numbers into a program, they went through a monthlong curriculum to get to the design portion. And the software recorded parameters such as time, distance,  fuel efficiency, and more. And their designs were judged and analyzed by a team of aviation engineers.

I thought you’d like to see what these students came up with. Here’s Saline’s design. Can you guess which Experimental airplane served as the inspiration? Extra points if you can name the exact model of that Experimental:

and a view from the cockpit:

And here is Canby’s design:

It’ll be fun to see how these kids bridge the gap from the virtual world to the physical process of assembling an airplane. I’ll be there for the first part of the two-week build to bring you the action, and I might even get a chance to do some riveting myself.  Look for more blogs on Reporting Points, plus an article in a future issue of AOPA Pilot.

Maybe a catching a ride on a different private jet might have been wise. Costa Rica’s President Laura Chinchilla has found herself in hot water after taking trips to Venezuela and Peru on the private jet of Gabriel Morales Fallon, a Colombian who is suspected to be linked to drug trafficking, reports the Raw Story. She blamed the flight on a “chain of lapses.”

Somebody needs to write a check.  The Australian Maritime Safety Authority says two hoax rescue calls cost $20,000 and wasted resources, reports the Herald Sun.  The first call was about an aircraft crashing off the coast of Perth, while call two was about a pilot crashing into a tree.

Let’s go to the video tape! A botanist who experienced a serious leg injury during research had to be rescued by a Los Angeles County sheriff’s helicopter crew, reports LA Observed. One of the helicopter’s crew recorded the rescue.

It’s always good when you can walk away.  And 84-year-old pilot walked away with minor injuries after an emergency landing of his Cessna 170, reports Livermore Patch.  Another pilot survived after his Tiger Moth biplane crashed just short of the runway at Lyden Airport, reports KBOI-TV.

Here’s a novel way to save your crops from frost!  Canadian apple farmer Phil Lyall paid a helicopter to fly over his grove of 10,000 trees to keep temperatures above freezing during a recent cold snap, reports the Telegraph.  He told the CBC that he could have lost 10 percent of his harvest if temperatures fell below 32 degrees F.

He went from high to low.  Police in Albuquerque, N.M., arrested Steven Acton at Double Eagle Airport after being caught with 41 lbs of very high-grade marijuana, reports KOB-TV.  The drugs were valued at $205,000.

Bison vs. helicopters. As soon as Montana’s Department of Livestock began its annual bison-hazing operations west of Yellowstone National Park using helicopters, the Alliance for the Wild Rockies asked for a temporary injunction to stop the practice, reports the Bozeman Daily Chronicle.

That toy could have done some damage.  The FBI questioned a Chinese student studying in the U.S. after he crashed a radio-controlled airplane near the Public Service Electric & Gas Bridgeport Harbor Generating Station, reports UPI.  After asking to retrieve his plane, a security guard said no and called the FBI.

• He doesn’t consider Flight of Passage an aviation book. “I consider it a memoir in the truer sense. It’s about life.”
• He was surprised when people wrote to tell him the book inspired them. “The biggest surprise of the book was getting emails from people saying ‘I’m so inspired by this, I’m going to learn to fly, I’m going to go take a flight.’” Many current pilots told him the book inspired them to make a coast-to-coast trip–and several did, including a pilot from Rhode Island who conducted the trip in an L-19.
• He and his brother are still flying, but not as much. Buck has been busy working on his latest book, which chronicles a trip by horse-drawn wagon over the Oregon Trail, but says that he still enjoys flying with friends. Kernahan is an attorney whose Boston practice keeps him busy.
• When researching Flight of Passage, he re-flew most of the routes in a Cessna 182. “It was amazing that I just remembered our old routes, that’s why the book could be so accurate in terms of landscapes.” The brothers landed at 30 airports. “Twenty-seven of them are still there and they look exactly the same.”
• He thinks you need to read Stick and Rudder, if you haven’t already. “The principles have not changed. You might be flying along in a Cirrus with a glass cockpit but it’s all still subject to all the same laws that [Wolfgang] Langewiesche wrote about.”

Detail one: the carbon-fiber airplane has 100,000 simulated rivets and screw heads in its molds, meaning the airplane appears to be made of metal. Detail two: when the pilot starts the aircraft, a sound system is automatically triggered playing a recording of the Merlin engine used by the real Mustang. The speaker is on the lower cowl disguised as a cooling vent. Detail three: puffs of smoke emerge from the fake exhaust stacks to add to the impression that this is almost the real thing.

Its aerobatic as heck, capable of plus 8 Gs and minus 4 Gs. Here are some details from the FK Web site. So when can you buy this $130,000 aircraft? You can’t yet. In July final testing and approval will be done in Europe, with deliveries in late summer. Then FK Lightplanes, headquartered in Poland with a branch in Germany, will go to work making the airplane with fixed gear to comply with the American light sport rules, getting rid of the adjustable prop because it also isn’t allowed on light sport aircraft, and getting ASTM approval so it can be sold as a S-LSA light sport aircraft.

Dan Johnson, head of the Light Aircraft Manufacturers Association and owner of the bydanjohnson Web site, reports on this and other models displayed at Aero, the main airshow in Europe for lightweight aircraft. Check his May 8 story.