Future of flight in kids’ hands

MUKILTEO – The Boeing Co.’s 787 Dreamliner might seem revolutionary in terms of technology, but it’s only a steppingstone to the aircraft of the future.

Just what shape that aircraft might take eludes even aviation’s elite, as educators around the area found out at a recent gathering held at the Future of Flight Aviation Center.

“You can’t just reach from here to there,” said Jake Schultz, who wrote “A Drive in the Clouds” and is working on the 787 program.

The next step for flight depends largely on today’s youth. That’s one reason why both teachers and those involved in aviation worry about ways to get students interested in aerospace – a subject that is falling through the cracks, said Michael Fopp, director general of England’s Royal Air Force Museum.

“We aren’t growing engineers and people interested in hard science,” Fopp said.

Teachers and parents need to find ways to make science and mathematics engaging if they hope to guide students toward careers involving those subjects, Fopp said. Museums, including the Future of Flight, have the type of hands-on programs that “fire up” students, he said.

Interactive programs, including some computer programs, challenge students in ways that even the 787’s chief engineering project pilot doesn’t understand.

“These kids can do things with their thumbs and fingers that I can’t imagine,” said Michael Carriker, who has participated in every Boeing flight test program since 1990. “I can fly the airplane, but I can’t write the code that flies the airplanes.”

The rapidly advancing nature of computer-aided aerospace is one reason today’s aviation leaders have difficulty predicting what tomorrow’s airplane might be. But that didn’t stop John Hutchinson from trying.

Hutchinson served as captain of the high-speed Concorde and envisions even faster jets in the future.

“I can’t believe in another lifetime or so we’ll all be plodding around at only 84 percent of the speed of sound,” he said.