For our friend and supporter we grieve.... Damirefa Due

The academy is very grateful for all their volunteers who help with teaching the young ladies at Kpong airfield towards achieving their dreams.

At the moment, we are finding it very hard to express that we have lost a very important volunteer (Kitty Houghton) who has done so many great things to support our school.

In Ghanaian language we will say to the late Kitty,"damirefa due".

Kitty is due to come to Ghana first week in March to help select more young ladies into the academy and we had a confirmation that, her ticket has has been purchased.

The Story:

http://www.unionleader.com/article/20130130/NEWS03/130129008/1006

Our educational philosophy:Memorize and apply..

In most educational establishments, the students are thought to learn and spew and not learn in order to remember.

The exercise for this morning was that, the students were split into groups of twos and threes, each group given an aircraft magazine article to read and to come up with a short summary concerning the subject.

It is amazing how much learning material we have on hand, the summaries from the group will be posted on the blog site when finished.

Greeting visitors ...

File Photo

There were very interesting interactions that took place with the cocoa farm experts who came to fly at the airfield today.

Most of these were well qualified, experience people could not stop asking the young ladies questions concerning aviation in general. Our girls really are growing into young professionals.

The visitors all had full briefing on safety at the airfield. After their flights, they then had a motivation education session on health matters,to do with the two most socio-economic devastating parasitic diseases,(malaria, schistosomiasis) since almost all these people are providing farming education in organic cocoa, and many of the people that they meet each week are likely to be exposed to these deadly diseases.

Prepping for a busy day...

We fly so many interesting people doing different things all across the country but tomorrow, are going to be flying a number of people from the cocoa farms.

In preparation, the ladies did most of the walk around, prepping everything ready for a good atmosphere for the explorers.

Since the seagulls, (third year students) are in their third year, they are expected to be able to interact professionally with such visitors as a part of their course.

Time for some class room work...

Since the ladies are very much involved in a lot of the new exciting projects going on at the airfield, this afternoon, they all worked very hard to keep up with reports writing for their portfolios.

Welcome Marcel... time to learn electronics.

The ladies in the academy are always doing exciting projects in the school and this time, Marcel Stieber from the USA who has incredible skill set when it comes to electronics, has come to volunteer with us.

Today, he explained a few new things about radios and why it is important to know more about them, to the ladies on duty, and he will continue with the second team tomorrow.

It takes Wings to fly....

After all the hard work in the workshop on the wings for our CH701 with a built in-fuel return system to meet our needs, the bottom skin work has been completed and the nose skin work in progress.

Next week, we start working on fuel tanks and all are looking forward to learning something new.

Riveting..

 Being in the AvTech academy gives you the opportunity to learn so many things including the use of the different tools in our workshop.

Today, each girl in the academy got to use both manual and pneumatic rivet guns. When you see the smiles on these youngsters faces, it is just amazing.

Always Learning

Today was a very busy one the students got heavily involved with De-clothing an aircraft.


Everyone got excited since this is not something that we do very often and is a great opportunity to learn more.

Time to Fly!

During a time like this, where everything gets so dirty quickly, the girls are all eager to go flying at the weekend.

They spent time with their planes pre-flighting and learning other new things with the hope for good weather tomorrow.

More progress on the bellpod

Today, we have been able to manufacture the bellypod prototype in wood and mounted it onto the belly of the plane.

We also started calculating the strength of the bolt and nut needed to mount the pod in order to spread the load evenly without stress points which will result in failure down the line.

The Ladies provided valid points towards the production of this artifact.

2013 Lessons begin

School started today. After cleaning the thick layers of harmattan dust off the workbenches, parts and tools .

We then started working on a bellypod concept that will allow the dropping of health education and other related materials into rural Ghana.

Here is the prototype model.