Model Airplanes

At the beginning of the school year, Tyler ISD Career and Technology Center (CTC) engineering teacher, Durk Watts, gave his aviation students a task: to rebuild a massive model airplane donated to the program by an airliner associated with Tyler Pounds Airport. The model plane was a long way from ‘model’ shape with many rusted and broken parts. The aviation students along with auto collision repair students worked every day to complete the project. However, their work came to a halt this past January when Mr. Watts unexpectedly passed after a sudden illness.

DeAnna Molloy, fellow CTC teacher and good friend of Mr. Watts, said that Mr. Watts intended for the plane to become a mascot for the aviation program and even named the plane the Rocket Express by CTC Airways. “It didn’t take us long to know that we had to all pull together to complete this model plane in his honor,” Molloy stated.

Completing the model plane quickly became a school wide project. Students in the auto paint and collision program fixed up and painted the fiberglass exterior, engineering and aviation students fit the interior with cabin seats and accessories and even printed exhaust fans for the wings using a 3D printer. Next, graphic design and audio visual students created a memorial poster that would become encased in a handmade wooden frame created by construction science students. The framed photo is displayed alongside a

Article source: http://www.cbs19.tv/article/news/tyler-isd-ctc-students-complete-model-airplane-in-memory-of-beloved-teacher/501-521052156

Boeing celebrated Tuesday production of its 10,000th single-aisle 737, putting what is already the best-selling jet of all time on track to become the best-selling large transport airplane in history.

Yet when the plane first flew more than 50 years ago, no one could have guessed its destiny.

The pilot in command on that first flight, now 93, recalled hopping around the globe in 737s in the years after the plane’s 1967 debut to goose flagging sales.

Article source: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/boeings-737-hits-historic-milestone-10000-planes-delivered/

(Reuters) – Boeing Co (BA.N) is doubling down on its landmark new strategy designed to muscle in on the business of maintenance providers by making its next jet the laboratory for in-house services that could radically alter the global business model for selling planes.

Unlike Boeing’s last all-new design, the 787 Dreamliner, its proposed new mid-market plane will not bring a flood of revolutionary technical designs to the drawing board.

But it will give the world’s largest plane maker a chance to test its new business approach of designing the plane so that it generates lucrative services revenues for Boeing while also offering efficiencies to airlines over the aircraft’s decades-long lifespan.

Along with production costs, the new approach could help Boeing decide whether to invest the $15 billion or more in development needed to build the jet.

“If we decide to launch, it’s a big investment and it’s an investment that has to contemplate not only the product itself but all of our other strategic objectives,” Chairman and Chief Executive Dennis Muilenburg told Reuters.

“So you can imagine we would want to look at this airplane through the lens of lifecycle value as we are growing our services business,” he said.

Until recently, Boeing and Europe’s Airbus (AIR.PA) sold planes with little involvement in the way they were operated and maintained. Instead, that was work carried out by their own suppliers or third-party shops.

Heavy outsourcing on jets like the

Article source: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-boeing-strategy/new-boeing-jet-to-accelerate-services-shake-up-idUSKCN1GP0DD