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Flights of Fancy

IMC

• It's time to get out the books on airplanes both fiction and informational.
• Look for photographs of early attempts at flight and compare some of the factors to those discovered in the paper airplane contest.
• Make a bulletin board display of some of those photographs with the title question: WILL IT FLY?  Suggest that students make educated guesses based on what they now about flight and tack yes or no tags to each picture.  When everyone who's interested has made a guess, let individuals explain their reasons.
• Contact airlines, the FAA and other agencies that deal with aviation safety.  Get and compare statistics on the safety records of various airlines.  Find ways to show this information in charts or graphs.
• While we're looking at flight mathematically, put together some figures about costs.  How much fuel does a commercial airliner consume during a flight.  How far can a given plane go on that much fuel? How much does a commercial jet cost?  How much does it make in a year?  How many passengers can the biggest ones take?
• Get descriptive words and phrases from people who have flown. Put together a group poem on flight using some of them.
• Investigate the effect on warfare of airplanes.  How were they first used?  What changed when airplanes became weapons of war?
• Look to the debate on manned and unmanned space flight.  Get a debate going on where the United States should be heading next.

Comments or Suggestions? E-mail eweiner