Whenuapai School’s visit to Base Auckland
By WGCDR Paul Cockenton
I went in to the classroom in the morning to give a talk about “how aircraft fly”. The reasons were two-fold; firstly, my daughter, Emma, is in year 8 at the school and I wanted to do something to help her understand what her mum and dad do for their work (and of course to add some value for her class’s learning), but secondly, and equally as important, Whenuapai School is a valued neighbour of the Base and the kids see aircraft taking off and landing everyday; but they likely had little understanding of how the take off and land. Therefore, I gave a talk describing how an aircraft flies, how it is controlled and how it is powered. The class sat and took it all in, asking excellent questions and when quizzed, giving excellent answers. They learnt the fundamentals with the aid of a few experiments with paper and balloons to demonstrate Bernoulli’s principle and Newton’s Laws. The real goal of course was to stimulate some interest in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) subjects which I think we did successfully.
After the classroom talk, we visited 40 SQN to look at all of the things that we talked about in the class. We looked at aerofoils and control surfaces, control cables and the control column in the cockpit. We looked at the different types of engine between the Boeing 757 and the C-103H(NZ) and just about everything in between. The children had a fun packed and informative morning and now, whenever they see an aircraft arriving or departing from Whenuapai, or when they go overseas on holiday, they have an understanding of how an aircraft flies.
