(Radio Iowa) – A group of high schoolers in the Quad Cities has built a two-seater airplane that’s ready to take to the skies. The P-N-B Aviation Club is made up of students in the Pleasant Valley, North Scott and Bettendorf school systems. The students are being mentored by Tom Shelton, a member of the local Experimental Aircraft Association Chapter 75.

“It is not about building the airplane,” Shelton says. “It is about educating students and developing a sense of responsibility, accountability, and bringing science and math to a practical, hands-on application.” It took two years of planning, starting in 2019, and then four years of construction. Shelton says the students have been meeting three times a week and put in over four-thousand labor hours on the project.

“Our chapter has been discussing this, I would say, for almost ten years,” he says, “because one of the objectives of our chapter is to promote aviation knowledge in younger students.”

The airplane is called an RV-12iS. It recently was granted its airworthiness certificate and will be test flown in the coming months.