1980s plane project helped Ohio students find way

March 19, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

COLUMBUS

In an era when students at Hamilton Township High School had their struggles in the classroom, teacher Bill Newnham offered them a challenge far more difficult than math homework.

He proposed that they build an airplane — a full-scale, two-seat Long-EZ that he would someday trust to fly.

To get Project School Flight off the ground in 1985, Newnham persuaded the board of education to establish an aviation class, with friends and vendors donating $25,000 in composite materials, an engine and other parts.

And, most important, he recruited 14-year-olds to volunteer their Saturdays to the assignment.

Five years and thousands of hours later, the aircraft was completed.

The experience for some of the 40 students who contributed to its construction took them to careers in engineering, aeronautics and other technical fields.

“Without Bill, I’m not sure if I would have gone into engineering,” said Andy Drumm, a 38-year-old engineer for the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency in Bowling Green. “He was that big of an influence.”

Meanwhile, although the plane had been prominently displayed at Port Columbus in the early 1990s, it spent the next 15 years hidden from view, resting in an Ohio Historical Society warehouse.

Only this month did Newnham, 75, and a few of his former students reunite with their masterpiece, now that it’s being donated to the Historical Aircraft Squadron Museum at the Fairfield County Airport in Carroll.

The nonprofit museum plans to restore the plane to its original flying condition and display it in its hangar, which is open to the public Wednesdays through Sundays.

“It’s a beautiful airplane; it was ahead of its time,” said Pat Ferguson, museum president. “It’s unbelievable that a bunch of kids got together and built this thing. It’s not easy to do.”

In the early 1980s, Newnham learned that a friend from his 20-year Air Force career had purchased materials for a Long-EZ plane but, because of an upcoming move to Europe, would be unable to work on it.

An industrial-arts teacher at Hamilton Township Middle School, Newnham imagined that high-school students, instead, could build the plane. Such a program, he thought, would benefit not only students interested in aviation but also the public perception of the school district.